Characterization of leaf transcriptome in a tropical tree species, Shorea curtisii, over a flowering season

General flowering (GF) is a synchronous flowering event in the Southeast Asian tropical rainforests that occurs at irregular intervals of multiple years. The unpredictable intervals of GF raise conservation concerns for these under-researched forests with rich economically and ecologically important species. In this study, the leaf transcriptome of a GF species, Shorea curtisii obtained from three time points – before and after floral initiation, and post flowering stage – was sequenced. We assembled 243,759,478 sequencing reads into 39,943 non-redundant unigenes including 677 putative homologs of Arabidopsis thaliana flowering-related genes. Differential expression analysis conducted on pairwise comparisons of the time points identified 930 differentially expressed unigenes, which includes 17 flowering-related homologs. The differential expression of unigenes with significant enrichments of functions related to drought corroborated the involvement of drought as an environmental cue for...