Dataset of de novo assembly and functional annotation of the transcriptome of blueberry (Vaccinium spp.)

Authors: QI, XINPENG - Orise Fellow; Ogden, Elizabeth; Ehlenfeldt, Mark; Rowland, Lisa

Submitted to: Data in Brief
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/5/2019
Publication Date: 8/12/2019
Citation: Qi, X., Ogden, E.L., Ehlenfeldt, M.K., Rowland, L.J. 2019. Dataset of de novo assembly and functional annotation of the transcriptome of blueberry (Vaccinium spp.). Data in Brief. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2019.104390.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2019.104390

Interpretive Summary: Blueberry is an economically important berry crop. Both production and consumption of blueberries have increased sharply worldwide in recent years at least partly due to their known health benefits. The development of improved genomic resources for blueberry, such as well-assembled DNA (genome) and RNA (transcriptome) sequences, could accelerate breeding through genomic-assisted approaches. All the genes of an organism are referred to collectively as the genome. Genes encode proteins through mRNA intermediates. All the mRNAs or transcripts of an organism are referred to collectively as the transcriptome. To enrich available transcriptome data and identify mRNAs potentially involved in fruit quality, RNA sequencing was performed on fruit tissue from two blueberry breeding populations. All RNA sequences from these two populations and other blueberry RNA sequences already publicly available, and downloaded from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Short Read Archive (SRA), were assembled together into one dataset of blueberry transcripts (a transcriptome of blueberry). These data will be useful to other scientists trying to develop genomic resources for blueberry and needing a reference transcriptome to identify genes encoding important horticultural traits in blueberry and related species, like cranberry and lingonberry.

Technical Abstract: Blueberry is an economically important berry crop. Both production and consumption of blueberries have increased sharply worldwide in recent years at least partly due to their known health benefits. The development of improved genomic resources for blueberry, such as a well-assembled genome and transcriptome, could accelerate breeding through genomic-assisted approaches. To enrich available transcriptome data and identify genes potentially involved in fruit quality, RNA sequencing was performed on fruit tissue from two northern-adapted hybrid blueberry breeding populations. RNA-seq was carried out using the Illumina HiSeqTM 2500 platform. Because of the absence of a reference-grade genome for blueberry, a transcriptome was de novo assembled from this RNA-seq data and other publicly available transcriptome data from blueberry downloaded from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Short Read Archive (SRA) using Trinity software program. After removing redundancy, this resulted in a dataset of 91,861 blueberry unigenes. All raw reads from the breeding populations were deposited in the NCBI SRA with accession numbers SRR6281886, SRR6281887, SRR6281888, and SRR6281889. The de novo transcriptome assembly was deposited at NCBI Transcriptome Shotgun Assembly (TSA) database with accession number GGAB00000000. These data will provide real expression evidence for the blueberry genome gene prediction and gene function annotation and a reference transcriptome for future gene expression studies involving blueberry fruit.