Illumina Sequencing of Common (Short) Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia L.) Reproductive Organs and Leaves

Ambrosia artemisiifolia L. (A. artemisiifolia, common ragweed) is one of the most aggressive, rapidly spreading and highly allergenic weeds found in many agricultural settings in the temperate zone. Chemical control of ragweed has some limitation in some crops, therefore it may cause reduced yields both in Europe and North America. The most affected are maize, sunflower, soya bean and pea in Europe (Chollet et al., 1999; Konstantinovic et al., 2005; Chauvel et al., 2006) and grains, tobacco and root crops in North America (Bassett and Crompton, 1975). Pollen allergy of common ragweed affects the human population's quality of life. Its pollen allergens are considered to be major elicitors of type I allergy during late summer and fall inducing respiratory distress such as allergenic rhinitis and seasonal asthma but it is also linked to eczema, ear infections in children and sinusitis (bacterial infection of the sinuses) in adults (Dykewicz, 2003). The spread of this weed therefore causes severe agricultural and public health problems that are important to be solved globally. For better understanding the genetic regulation of the common ragweed reproduction biology we sequenced the mRNA of flower tissues and leaves of different developmental stages using the Illumina platform. To this end different gender flowers, of this monoecious, dicotyledonous invasive weed were collected from a natural Ambrosia population of a highly infested West-Transdanubian region in Hungary. The sequence data were assembled de novo to create a reference transcriptome for our future work for this species. Raw reads of the transcriptome assembly have been deposited to NCBI's Sequence Read Archive (SRA) database with the accession numbers SRR3995704 (male flower), SRR3995703 (female flower), and SRR3995705 (leaves). SRA accession: SRP08007. Bioproject ID: PRJNA335689. The Transcriptome Shotgun Assembly project has been deposited at DDBJ/ENA/GenBank under the accession {"type":"entrez-nucleotide","attrs":{"text":"GEZL00000000","term_id":"1068530956","term_text":"GEZL00000000"}}GEZL00000000. The version described in this paper is the first version, {"type":"entrez-nucleotide","attrs":{"text":"GEZL01000000","term_id":"1068530956","term_text":"gb||GEZL01000000"}}GEZL01000000. The presented data were used for the first time to determine the complete coding sequence and putative signal peptide of an Amb a 3 allergen isoform of A. artemisiifolia recently (Taller et al., 2016).