Lolium perenne strain:P226/135/16 Transcriptome or Gene expression

Perennial ryegrass is a highly heterozygous outbreeding grass species used for turf and forage. Heterozygosity can affect de-Bruijn graph assembly making de novo transcriptome assembly of species such as perennial ryegrass challenging. Creating a reference transcriptome from a homozygous perennial ryegrass genotype can circumvent the challenge of heterozygosity. The goals of this study were to perform RNA-sequencing on multiple tissues from a highly inbred genotype to develop a reference transcriptome. De novo transcriptome assembly of the inbred genotype created 186,141 transcripts with an average length of 830 base pairs. Within the inbred reference transcriptome 78,627 predicted open reading frames were found of which 24,434 were predicted as complete. Functional annotation found 50,946 transcripts with a BLASTp hit from the Swiss-Prot non-redundant database, 58,996 transcripts with a Pfam protein domain and 2,357 putative secreted proteins. To evaluate the reference transcriptome we targeted the high-affinity K+ transporter gene family and found multiple orthologs. Our study has developed an annotated, comprehensive transcriptome reference for perennial ryegrass that can aid in determining genetic variation, expression analysis, genome annotation, and gene mapping.