Pearl millet FLX/454 ESTs from drought stressed tissues of ICMB 841-P3 and 863B-P2

Pearl millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.] is the 6th most important cereal crop globally, but there are limited genomic tools available for this crop. In an attempt to improve genomic resources for this crop, two elite pearl millet inbreds ICMB 841-P3 and 863B-P2 were drought stressed at boot-leaf stage using a standard dry-down protocol. Total RNA extracted from stressed root and leaf tissues of each inbred was used for cDNA synthesis. Finally four cDNA samples were prepared viz., (1) Sample1_ICMB 841-P3_Leaf, (2) Sample2_ICMB 841-P3_Root, (3) Sample3_863B-P2 _Leaf and (4) Sample4_863B-P2 _Root. At J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI, USA) sample preparation, transfer of DNA onto DNA capture beads, FLX/454 sequencing and assembly of the resulting cleaned ESTs were done. For the four samples sequenced, only one half-plate run (half of the PicoTiterPlate) was performed using Genome Sequencer FLX™ System. This resulted in (1) 183657, (2) 188823, (3) 174513 and (4) 190534 reads for the four samples respectively. These raw EST sequences were subsequently cleaned of rRNA, vector, adaptor and poor quality sequences to get (1) 58445, (2) 139913, (3) 71535 and (4) 127705 cleaned reads for the four samples respectively. The assembly using the Plant Transcript Assemblies (PLANTTA) pipeline at JCVI resulted in 34270 contigs and 78594 singletons.