General thoughts & discussion

When starting with this project, I believed that it would be quite easy to find out which genes that were upregulated and how the expression level differed between tissue types. However, it was a bit hard to interpret the results from the differential expression analyses. Even now, after finishing this project I am quite uncertain if my conclusions are correct or not.

I think that the assembled genome has some bias; when producing the heatmap from the DESeq2 differential expression analysis it showed a gene that was very varied in a transcriptomic read, but it only had one more read count than for the other transcriptomic reads when checking the output from HTseq. I feel like that gene was not very varied in expression level compared with the other ones. As I mentioned above, this is probably due to some bias in the assembled genome.

I only obtained results about the functions of two genes that were upregulated, since the other ones had not been previously annotated so no data existed for them. The function of one gene in the durian fruit is that it works as a transcription factor, and the function of the other gene is that it creates methionine. I think that the gene that have the function as a transcription factor is related to the ripening of the fruit. Therefore I also think that the gene is related to the odor and taste of the fruit since that changes according to the fruits life cycle. I think that the other gene that creates methionine is associated with producing volatile sulfur compounds which are associated with the fruits odor. Methionine regeneration is also associated with the ethylene biosynthesis which is associated the ripening of the fruit.