Transcriptomic Analysis of Flower Development in the Bamboo Phyllostachys violascens (Poaceae: Bambusoideae).

Bamboo flowering is a complicate phenomenon for its long period and unpredictability. In this study, three successive stages of flowering buds from flowering bamboo (Lei bamboo, Phyllostachys violascens) plants and the corresponding vegetative buds of non-flowering plants were collected for transcriptome analysis. By using Illumina RNA-Seq method, about 442 million clean sequence reads were generated from the above samples and assembled into 317,273 transcripts with N50 of 1,968 bp, then acquired 132,678 unigenes with N50 of 1,080 bp, about 44.18% of the unigenes annotated in at least one database. 7,266 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were determined through GO and KEGG analysis. Some DEGs were involved in plant hormone signal transduction and circadian rhythm pathways, which were highly expressed in the former and middle flower development stages, respectively. Our paper presents a useful data and a critical sampling method for studying flowering mechanism in bamboo.