Transcriptome Analysis of NY18 and df74 Sepals

The sepals of NY18 and df74 were harvested and immediately frozen in liquid nitrogen and then stored at −80°C for RNA extraction and transcriptome analysis. Three biological replicates were performed. Total RNA was extracted using a MiniBEST Plant RNA Extraction Kit (TaKaRa, Dalian, China). RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) was carried out by Novogene Bioinformatics Technology Co. Ltd. The RNA quality was determined by a Qubit RNA Assay Kit in Qubit 2.0 Fluorometer (Life Technologies, Carlsbad, CA, United States), RNA Nano 6000 Assay Kit, and Bioanalyzer 2100 system (Agilent Technologies, Santa Clara, CA, United States). Then, six sequencing libraries were constructed and sequenced on Illumina Hiseq 2000 platform, and 100 bp paired-end reads were generated. These methods were described by Wang et al. (2020) (link).