Full-length transcriptomes of 25 grassland plant species

Grasslands are essential, biodiverse ecosystems of economic importance
that play a critical role for carbon storage and soil health. Despite
their ecological and economic importance, transcriptomic resources for
wild grassland species facilitating eco-evolutionary and functional
genomic studies remain limited. In this study, we present full-length
transcriptomes for shoot tissue of natural accessions of 25 wild grassland
plant species collected from the field site of a long-term grassland
biodiversity experiment (Jena Experiment). Using PacBio Iso-Seq
technology, we generated a total of 522.45 million subreads which were
assembled into isoforms for each species separately. This resulted in an
average of 49,180 isoforms per species of which 68.6% were successfully
annotated against the Swiss-Prot database. Fifty-six percent of the
transcripts had complete open reading frames (ORFs), and 29.6% of the
transcripts have been identified as non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) by two
prediction tools. This dataset provides a valuable full-length
transcriptomic resource for exploring gene expression, alternative
splicing, and evolutionary patterns in wild grassland plant species,
paving the way for future functional genomics and conservation studies.