BACKGROUND Asian lotus (Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn.) is the national flower of India, Vietnam, and one of the top ten traditional Chinese flowers. Although lotus is highly valued for its ornamental, economic and cultural uses, genomic information, particularly the expressed sequence based (genic) markers is limited. High-throughput transcriptome sequencing provides large amounts of transcriptome d...

Lotus (Nelumbo nucifera), which is distributed widely throughout Asia, Australia and North America, is an aquatic perennial that has been cultivated for over 2,000 years. It is very stimulating that almost all parts of lotus have been consumed as vegetable as well as food, especially the seeds. Except for the nutritive values of lotus, there has been increasing interest in its potential as func...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are endogenous non-coding RNAs with important regulatory functions in plant development and stress responses. However, their population abundance in lotus (Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn) has so far been poorly described, particularly in response to stresses. In this work, submergence-related miRNAs and their target genes were systematically identified, compared, and validated at th...

Nelumbo nucifera is an evolutionary relic from the Late Cretaceous period. Sequencing the N. nucifera mitochondrial genome is important for elucidating the evolutionary characteristics of basal eudicots. Here, the N. nucifera mitochondrial genome was sequenced using single molecule real-time sequencing technology (SMRT), and the mitochondrial genome map was constructed after de novo assembly an...

The cholinergic hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has provided the rationale for the current pharmaco-therapy of this disease, in an attempt to reduce the cognitive decline caused by cholinergic deficits. Nevertheless, the search for potent and long-acting acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitors that exert minimal side effects in AD patients is still ongoing. AChE inhibitors are currently t...

A validated HPLC-DAD-ESI-MS(n) method for the analysis of non-anthocyanin flavonoids was applied to nine different tissues of twelve lotus genotypes of Nelumbo nucifera and N. lutea, together with an optimized anthocyanin extraction and separation protocol for lotus petals. A total of five anthocyanins and twenty non-anthocyanin flavonoids was identified and quantified. Flavonoid contents and c...