SeagrassDB: An open-source transcriptomics portal for exploring the phylogenetically profiled transcriptomics landscape in aquatic plants

Transcriptomics-assisted gene mining approaches have been widely used for understanding the physiological implications of how an organism respond to the surrounding environment. Next generation sequencing based transcriptomics has played a key role in the identification of new functional genes, allowing a understanding of species genomic adaptation to their surrounding environment. Apart from genomic understanding, large scale transcriptome profiling has played a major role in understanding evolutionary constraints and has been also used to estimate the convergence and divergence of traits between species. Aquatic plants represent an important clade of higher plants, which have been recently been examined to identify loss and gain of gene families through whole genome sequencing approaches. In the present research, we present a large scale transcriptomics repository of aquatic plants, which provides complete transcriptomes of 9 seagrass species spanning across 1052262 unigenes and allowing for rapid mining of functional genes across these transcriptomes. SeagrassDB not only allows for the comparative mining of genes using BLAST, but also allows the information to be downloaded with features such as relative rates of expression as FPKM values, gene ontologies, BLASTx based assignment and family level classification, interpro domains, KEGG orthology, transcriptions factors and prosite information for each classified unigenes for respective species.