Predicted flavonoid biosynthetic pathway-related genes and products in the safflower flower.

<p>The pathways leading to the biosynthesis of different flavonoids. Abbreviations: CHS, chalcone synthase; CHI, chalcone isomerase; F3H, flavanone3-hydroxylase; F3′H, flavonoid 3′-hydroxylase;F3′5′H, flavonoid 3′,5′-hydroxylase; FLS, flavonol synthase; DFR, dihydroflavonol 4-reductase; LAR, leucoanthocyanidin reductase; 3GT, flavonol 3-O-glucosyltransferase; and 3GRT, flavonol-3-O-glucoside L-rhamnosyltransferase. The dotted arrow indicates that the involved enzymes are not yet clear.</p

Safflower flower phenotypes and schematics of the transcriptome sequencing analysis.

<p>(A) Phenotypes of the red/orange (left) and white (mutant; right) flowers of <i>Carthamus tinctorius</i> L. used in this study. (B) Overall workflow of the experiment. (C) Overall workflow of the data assembly. (D) Overall workflow of the bioinformatic analysis.</p

qRT-PCR analysis of 12 flavonoid biosynthetic pathway-related candidate unigenes in white and red flowers.

<p>W2, flowering day 2 of the white flower; W4, flowering day 4 of the white flower; R2, flowering day 2 of the red flower; R4, flowering day 4 of the red flower. The numbers after the gene name means the serial number of unigene. The gene sequences used for qRT-PCR analysis are shown in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0038653#pone.0038653.s005" target="_blank">File S5</a>.</p

Summary of the sequence assembly after Illumina sequencing.

<p>Summary of the sequence assembly after Illumina sequencing.</p

Overview of the safflower flower tissue transcriptome assembly.

<p>(A) The size distribution of the contigs obtained from our <i>de novo</i> assembly of high-quality clean reads. (B) The size distribution of the unigenes produced from further assembly of contigs (i.e., contig joining, gap filling, and scaffold clustering). (C) The size distribution of the CDS produced by searching unigene sequences against various protein databases (Nr, SwissProt, KEGG and COG, in order) using BLASTX (E-value <10⁻⁵). (D) The size distribution of the proteins predicted from the CDS sequences. (E) And (F) Size distributions of the ESTs and proteins obtained from the ESTScan results. For unigene CDS that had no hits in the databases (Nr, SwissProt, KEGG and COG), the BLAST results were subjected to ESTScans and then translated into peptide sequences.</p