Interpretable Network Rewiring Identifies Stress-Specific Regulatory Hub Genes in the Endangered Medicinal Plant Coptis teeta

Coptis teeta is the species central to our study. It is an endangered medicinal herb endemic to the Eastern Himalayas and a major source of berberine and coptisine. Previous transcriptomic study of this species under stress and normal condition was limited to differential gene expression analysis. Analysis on condition-specific regulatory relationships across stress and normal conditions was lacking. To address this gap, we reprocessed RNA-seq data from Nath et al. (2026) to construct separate drought and heat co-expression networks, and we tracked stress dependent changes in gene connectivity through an interpretable rewiring framework. We identified robust hub genes which were validated across multiple correlation thresholds.Then we ranked candidates using an integrated score factoring network centrality, expression magnitude and rewiring evidence. The robust hubs we identified were found significantly enriched among strongly rewired genes with p=0.038 and 81.5% the drought GO enrichment genes intersected with our prioritized set. This suggestsIni that stress adaptation actively reshapes primary regulatory centers. Independent cross validation against Nath et al. 2026 confirmed seven prioritized candidate genes. These consisted of tyrosine/DOPA decarboxylase (TYDC), which exhibited a ten-fold connectivity gain under drought, and a drought-responsive GATA transcription factor. Homology mapping using BLASTP resolved identities for 20 robust hubs out of 24. This topological approach offers a transparent framework to rank genes based on known, weighted factors in an endangered non-model plant with small sample sizes.