Transcriptome exploration to provide a resource for the study of Auricularia heimuer

Auriculariaheimuer, an edible jelly fungus, is in considerable demand in Asia due to its high nutritive, economic and medicinal values. RNA-Seq was used to investigate and analyze the mycelium transcriptome of A. heimuer for gene discovery. A total of 26,857 unigenes with an N50 length of 1333 bp were assembled by de novo sequencing. In addition, unigenes were annotated by publicly available databases, including gene descriptions, gene ontology (GO), clusters of orthologous group (COG), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) metabolic pathways, and protein family (Pfam) terms. A. heimuer was also studied for its wood degradation ability. Thirty-eight putative FOLymes (fungal oxidative lignin enzymes) and 251 CAZymes (carbohydrate-active enzymes) were located from A. heimuer transcriptome. Our study provides a comprehensive sequence resource for A. heimuer at the transcriptional level, which will lay a strong foundation for functional genomics studies and gene discovery of this promising fungus.