Unique features of the mA methylome and its response to drought stress in sea buckthorn ( Linn.).

In plants, recent studies have revealed that N6-methyladenosine (mA) methylation of mRNA has potential regulatory functions of this mRNA modification in many biological processes. mA methyltransferase, mA demethylase and mA-binding proteins can cause differential phenotypes, indicating that mA may have critical roles in the plant. In this study, we depicted the mA map of sea buckthorn ( Linn.) transcriptome. Similar to , mA sites of sea buckthorn transcriptome is significantly enriched around the stop codon and within 3'-untranslated regions (3'UTR). Gene ontology analysis shows that the mA modification genes are associated with metabolic biosynthesis. In addition, we identified 13,287 different mA peaks (DMPs) between leaf under drought (TR) and control (CK) treatment. It reveals that mA has a high level of conservation and has a positive correlation with mRNA abundance in plants. GO and KEGG enrichment results showed that DMP modification DEGs in TR were particularly associated with ABA biosynthesis. Interestingly, our results showed three mA demethylase ( and ) genes were significantly increased following drought stress, which indicated that it may contributed the decreased mA levels. This exhaustive mA map provides a basis and resource for the further functional study of mRNA mA modification in abiotic stress.