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Pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum, also known as Cenchrus americanus) is a cereal crop that has a C4 photosynthesis system and that can grow and develop seeds even under stressed conditions including drought-stressed, high temperature-stressed and nutrient-poor conditions. In previous studies, transcriptomes of pearl millet were studied by RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) to understand mechanisms regulating its development and tolerance to such stressed conditions. Here, RNA-Seq reads from 565 pearl millet samples from 25 projects in the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) BioProject database were collected and mapped to the pearl millet reference genome to obtain read counts and transcripts per million (TPM) for each pearl millet gene. The count and TPM data for all the 565 samples as well as the attributes of those samples and projects were deposited in the figshare repository (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24902100).

The family Orchidaceae comprises the most species of any monocotyledonous family and has interesting characteristics such as seed germination induced by mycorrhizal fungi and flower morphology that co-adapted with pollinators. In orchid species, genomes have been decoded for only a few horticultural species, and there is little genetic information available. Generally, for species lacking sequenced genomes, gene sequences are predicted by de novo assembly of transcriptome data. Here, we devised a de novo assembly pipeline for transcriptome data from the wild orchid Cypripedium (lady slipper orchid) in Japan by mixing multiple data sets and integrating assemblies to create a more complete and less redundant contig set. Among the assemblies generated by combining various assemblers, Trinity and IDBA-Tran yielded good assembly with higher mapping rates and percentages of BLAST hit contigs and complete BUSCO. Using this contig set as a reference, we analyzed differential gene expression between protocorms grown aseptically or with mycorrhizal fungi to detect gene expressions required for mycorrhizal interaction. A pipeline proposed in this study can construct a highly reliable contig set with little redundancy even when multiple transcriptome data are mixed, and can provide a reference that is adaptable to DEG analysis and other downstream analysis in RNA-seq.

Pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. BR.) is a cereal crop mainly grown in India and sub-Saharan Africa. In pearl millet, genes and genomic regions associated with traits are largely unknown. Pearl millet parental lines bred at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) are useful for the production and breeding of pearl millet. However, the phenotypic diversity of these lines has not been fully evaluated. In this study, 16 traits of 107 of those parental lines were assessed with field trials in Japan, and a genome-wide association study (GWAS) was performed using these phenotypic data to identify the genomic regions and genes associated with those traits. The GWAS revealed genomic regions associated with culm height and pigmentation of the shoot basal part (PS). The genomic region associated with PS contained a homolog of PHENYLALANINE AMMONIA LYASE 2 (PAL2), a gene involved in anthocyanin accumulation in Arabidopsis thaliana. The PAL2 homolog can be a candidate for a gene involved in regulating PS in pearl millet. These results provide a better understanding of the phenotypic diversity of pearl millet and its genetic background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]