Transcriptomics of Chili Pepper Fruit with Emphasis on the Carotenoid Biosynthetic Pathway

Chili pepper is an important horticultural crop worldwide. All chili peppers belong to the Capsicum genus of the Solanaceae family. Chili pepper fruits produce a series of secondary metabolites such as capsaicinoids (pungent compounds), pigments (anthocyanins and carotenoids), and vitamins (vitamins C, B, A, and E). Chili pepper pods have been used as models to study the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway; these pigments are responsible for the yellow, orange, and red colors of chili pepper fruits. Although the structural genes of this process have been described and characterized, their transcriptional regulation seems to be a complex process and has not been quite established. An approach to try to identify potential transcription factors involved in carotenoid biosynthesis regulation is through transcriptomic co-expression analysis. Here, we describe different transcriptomic results, and we also present an RNA-Seq network co-expression analysis to identify putative TF candidates to regulate the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway in chili pepper fruits.