Transcriptome of High-Sucrose Sugarcane Variety GT35

Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) is the most important sugar crop and a major source of bio-ethanol. Sucrose accumulation is important in sugarcane, but it has not been investigated by transcriptome analysis . In this study, the transcriptome of a high-sucrose sugarcane variety, GT35, was sequenced using high-throughput Solexa technology. A total of 34,105,138 high-quality reads with an average length of 75 bp were obtained. These reads were assembled into 101,255 unigenes, with a mean length of 460 bp and an N50 length of 640 bp. BLAST searches indicated that 36,472 (36.0 %) unigenes had homologous sequences in the NCBI non-redundant protein sequences databases, and 23,811 (23.5 %) had homologous sequences in the Swiss-Prot databases. A total of 14,613 unigenes were assigned gene ontology terms, and 13,231 were assigned functional annotations and grouped into 25 functional categories. A KEGG pathway analysis of 30,756 unigenes revealed more than 30 pathways in the sugarcane transcriptome. A total of 3420 simple sequence repeats were identified in 3185 unigenes. The data in this study enriched the sugarcane transcriptome resources and will be useful for further comparison and functional genomic studies in genus Saccharum and family Poaceae, and will be useful for further detailed elucidation of sucrose accumulation in sugarcane.