Abstract: Biotic and abiotic stresses pose a great threat to crop yields and ecological environment conservation. As herbs, shrubs and trees are extremely adaptable to the external environment, it has become a current trend to identify the stress-tolerant genes and investigate the adaptive mechanisms of herbs, shrubs and trees. Research on molecular mechanisms of plant resistance to stress, using sequencing technology, has become a major part of the investigation of plant stress physiology. As biotechnology has developed, the transcriptome approach (RNA-seq) has emerged as one of the crucial approaches for identification of stress-tolerant genes. The next-generation sequencing technologies (NGS) are low cost and have greater depth than ever before. These include Roche/454, Illumina/Solexa, and ABI/Solid, and have been widely applied to whole-genome, RNA-seq and miRNA sequencing studies. Therefore, RNA-seq has high potential to accelerate the elucidation of the molecular mechanisms of herb, shrub and tree resistance and thus for identification of a large resource of gene sequence information. Such research will lay a solid foundation for developing stress-tolerant crops, herbs, shrubs and tree species. Research examples of the biotic and abiotic stress-tolerance of herbs, shrubs and trees identified using RNA-seq are introduced in this paper. The emerging trends and prospects for further applications of RNA-seq are also discussed.

Key words: RNA-seq, biotic stress, abiotic stress, plant stress resistance