Conifers have a great economic and environmental value. Nitrogen is an important limiting factor for the
development of plants. Conifers are well adapted to ammonium nutrition since it is the main source of
inorganic nitrogen in the ecosystems that they live.
The present work is based on the study of ammonium uptake and management by maritime pine (Pinus
pinaster Aiton) and its implication in the production of plant biomass. This conifer is present in western
Mediterranean area and it is used for reforestation soil stabilization and industry. Due to its importance
in this region maritime pine has been used as model conifer tree which has led to different omics studies
and resources.
For this purpose we have developed several experiments using pine seedlings subjected to different
levels of ammonium at the short and long term using the latest biotechnological and bioinformatic
advances. The studies of RNA-seq allow us to obtain a large amount of transcriptomic information of
mRNA lncRNA and miRNA level in the roots under ammonium nutrition. These data need different
bioinformatic workflows to extract expression results with reliability and biological context. Parallel to
these studies we have performed direct RNA sequencing using the Minion device of Oxford Nanopore
Technologies (ONT). Thanks to this kind of technology we have been able to identify epitranscriptomics
changes in our samples under ammonium nutrition. With this aim we have had to develop a new
bioinformatic workflow. The characteristics of this new kind of sequencing allow us to analyze the RNAseq studies from another perspective.