Genomics, Transcriptomics and miRNA Family Resources for Phalaenopsis aphrodite and the Orchid Family

Phalaenopsis aphrodite, an epiphytic orchid native to Taiwan and Philippines, possesses many desirable horticultural characteristics permitting its use as parents in breeding commercial orchid hybrids. In order to facilitate the development of genomics/omics breeding tools for orchids, our effort was geared to making P. aphrodite gene annotations and transcriptome resources more accessible to the orchid research community. In this chapter, we review our major progress in P. aphrodite genomics and functional genomics, focusing on the genome sequencing and annotation, whole transcriptome analysis of flower development, analysis of orchid miRNA, and the integrative functional genomics database for the orchid family.