RNA-sequencing of mature pollen and isolated generative cell in Lilium longiflorum. Lilium longiflorum

In plant pollen development, smaller generative cell is established within larger vegetative cell. We aimed to dissect the complexity and divergence of the transcriptional programs of the generative and vegetative cells of pollen. In this study, we chose lily as our experimental material, as it has one of the pollen types where generative cells can be released intact from the confines of the pollen wall. To overcome the lack of reference genome sequence, we performed RNA-sequencing to obtain de novo assembled transcriptome that can be used as a reference for differential expression analysis. Total RNA was extracted from two distinct samples, mature pollen and isolated generative cell, and two cDNA libraries were paired-end sequenced on Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform.