Transcriptome profiling of Elettaria cardamomum (L.) Maton (small cardamom)

Elettaria cardamomum (L.) Maton, known as ‘queen of spices, is a perennial herbaceous monocot of the family Zingiberaceae, native to southern India. Cardamom is an economically valuable spice crop and used widely in culinary and medicinal purposes. In the present study, using Ion Proton RNA sequencing technology, we performed transcriptome sequencing and de novo transcriptome assembly of a wild and five cultivar genotypes of cardamom. RNA-seq generated a total of 22,811,983 (92 base) and 24,889,197 (75 base) raw reads accounting for approximately 8.21GB and 7.65GB of sequence data for wild and cultivar genotypes of cardamom respectively. The raw data was submitted to SRA database of NCBI under the accession numbers SRX1141272 (wild) and SRX1141276 (cultivars). The raw reads were quality filtered and assembled using MIRA assembler resulted with 112,208 and 264,161contigs having N50 value 616 and 664 for wild and cultivar cardamom. The assembled unigenes were functionally annotated using several databases including PlantCyc for pathway annotation. This work represents the first report on cardamom transcriptome sequencing. In order to generate a comprehensive reference transcriptome we further assembled the raw reads of wild and cultivar genotypes which might enrich the plant transcriptome database and trigger advanced research in cardamom genomics. 

Citation
Nadiya, F., N. Anjali, Jinu Thomas, A. Gangaprasad, K. K. Sabu. 2017. Transcriptome profiling of Elettaria cardamomum (L.) Maton (small cardamom). Genomics Data Vol 11: 102–103. doi: 10.1016/j.gdata.2016.12.013

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Development of a New Pipeline for Identification and Characterization of MicroRNAs from Plants

Open source microRNA analysis pipelines for next generation sequencing data (NGS) often make necessary use and working knowledge of command line interface, massive data processing resources and expertise which is a daunting task for biologists. Further, the microRNA data generated from NGS platforms will not be in a form from which one could understand or make use of it. Hence a comprehensive pipeline has been developed by integrating several open source NGS tools along with a graphical user interface called sRNAbench. It is useful for expression profiling of small RNAs and prediction of microRNAs from NGS data. The pipeline features functionalities such as read processing, sequence identification, target prediction and enrichment analysis. It provides even prediction of novel microRNAs and its sequences. The pipeline will be very useful for plant genomics community and it does not require knowledge in computational biology in order to discover miRNAs and utilize the same in genomics studies.

Citation
Thomas, J. and K. K. Sabu. 2016. Development of a New Pipeline for Identification and Characterization of MicroRNAs from Plants. International Journal for Computational Biology 5(1): 21-27.