Fagopyrum esculentum Raw sequence reads. Fagopyrum esculentum

Background: Common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) is an important staple food crop in southwest China, where drought stress is one of largest limiting factors leading to reduce the crop production. In order to reveal the molecular mechanism of common buckwheat in response to drought stress, we performed a comprehensive transcriptomics study to evaluate gene expression profiles of common buckwheat during PEG-mediated drought treatment.Results: In total, 45 million of clean reads were assembled into 53,404 unigenes with an average length of 749 bp and N50 length of 1296 bp. A total of 1,329 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified by comparing well-watered and drought-treated plants, out of which 666 were up–regulated and 663 were down-regulated. Furthermore, we defined the functional characteristics of DEGs using GO and KEGG classification. GO enrichment analysis showed that the DEGs were significantly overrepresented in four categories, including “oxidoreductase activity”, “oxidation-reduction process”, “xyloglucan: xyloglucosyl transferase activity” and “apoplast”. Using KEGG pathways analysis, a large number of annotated genes was overrepresented in terms such as “plant hormone signal transduction” “phenylpropanoid biosynthesis”, “photosynthesis” and “carbon metabolism”.Conclusions: These results can be further exploited to investigate the molecular mechanism of common buckwheat in response to drought treatment, and could supply with valuable molecular sources for abiotic-tolerant elites breeding programs in future.