Towards complete deconstruction of cotton transcriptional landscape

Recently, Wang et al. systematically explored the transcription landscape in diploid cotton Gossypium arboreum. In the study, they integrated four high-throughput sequencing techniques, including Pacbio sequencing, strand-specific RNA sequencing (ssRNA-seq), Cap analysis gene expression sequencing (CAGE-seq), and PolyA sequencing (PolyA-seq) to profile the RNA transcriptome of G. arboreum. They developed a pipeline, IGIA to construct accurate gene structure annotation based on the updated genome of G. arboreum and the multi-strategic RNA-seq data. Their study revealed some intriguing phenomena and potential novel mechanisms in the regulation of RNA transcription in plants, and also provided valuable resources for further functional genomic research in cotton.