De novo Assembly and Characterization of Swertia japonica Transcriptome for the Identification of Candidate Genes Involved in the Biosynthesis of Therapeutic Metabolites

Here, we performed deep transcriptome sequencing for the aerial-tissues and the roots of S. japonica, generating over 2 billion raw reads with an average length of 101 nt by using an Illumina paired-end sequencing by HiSeq2000 platform. Using a combined approach of three popular assemblers, de novo transcriptome assembly for S. japonica was obtained, yielding in 81,729 unigenes with an average length as 884bps and N50-value as 1,452bps, with 46,963 unigenes being annotated based on the sequence similarity against NCBI-nr protein database. Overall design: Transcriptome profiling of the aerial-tissues and the roots of Swertia japonica