Drought-induced transcriptomic changes in three modern sugarcane cultivars grown in China

Sugarcane is an important industrial crop and is widely cultivated worldwide for sugar and biofuel production. Modern sugarcane, a polyploid interspecific hybrid species, was originally produced by crossing Saccharum officinarum and S. spontaneum and it is relatively tolerant to many biotic and abiotic stresses Among the diverse abiotic stresses, drought greatly reduces sugar yield and biomass accumulation. In this study, transcriptome of three cultivars, which are widely grown in South China, were collected under different levels of water stress and non-stress (well-watered control) treatments. A total of 669 Gb clean transcriptome data were obtained from 81 samples using Illumina HiSeq4000 platform. On average each sample had approximately 8.26 Gb clean data with 95% Q20 values for clean reads%. The clean reads were mapped to S. spontaneum L. component of sugarcane genome with the average 57.97% mapping ratio of total reads. These data will be a valuable foundation dataset for studying the molecular and genetic basis of sugarcane response to increasing drought stress.