BACKGROUND Perennial ryegrass is a highly heterozygous outbreeding grass species used for turf and forage production. Heterozygosity can affect de-Bruijn graph assembly making de novo transcriptome assembly of species such as perennial ryegrass challenging. Creating a reference transcriptome from a homozygous perennial ryegrass genotype can circumvent the challenge of heterozygosity. The goals ...

Transcriptome assembly from RNA-Seq reads is an active area of bioinformatics research. The ever-declining cost and the increasing depth of RNA-Seq have provided unprecedented opportunities to better identify expressed transcripts. However, the nonlinear transcript structures and the ultra-high throughput of RNA-Seq reads pose significant algorithmic and computational challenges to the existing...

Whereas de novo assemblies of RNA-Seq data are being published for a growing number of species across the tree of life, there are currently no broadly accepted methods for evaluating such assemblies. Here we present a detailed comparison of 99 transcriptome assemblies, generated with 6 de novo assemblers including CLC, Trinity, SOAP, Oases, ABySS and NextGENe. Controlled analyses of de novo ass...

RNA-seq allows detection and precise quantification of transcripts, provides comprehensive understanding of exon/intron boundaries, aids discovery of alternatively spliced isoforms and fusion transcripts along with measurement of allele-specific expression. Researchers interested in studying and constructing transcriptomes, especially for non-model species, often face the conundrum of choosing ...

Transcriptome assembly using RNA-seq data - particularly in non-model organisms has been dramatically improved, but only recently have the pre-assembly procedures, such as sequencing depth and error correction, been studied. Increasing read length is viewed as a crucial condition to further improve transcriptome assembly, but it is unknown whether the read length really matters. In addition, th...

Canada is the world’s largest producer of canola and the trend of production is ever increasing with an annual growth rate of 9.38% according to FAOSTAT [1]. In 2017, canola acreage surpassed wheat in Saskatchewan, the highest producer of both crops in Canada. Country-wide, the total farming area of canola increased by 9.9% to 22.4 million acres while wheat area saw a slight decline to 23.3 mil...

A comprehensive transcriptome assembly of chickpea has been developed using 134.95 million Illumina single-end reads, 7.12 million single-end FLX/454 reads and 139,214 Sanger expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from >17 genotypes. This hybrid transcriptome assembly, referred to as Cicer arietinumTranscriptome Assembly version 2 (CaTA v2, available at http://data.comparative-legumes.org/transcriptome...

We present a new transcriptome assembly of the Pacific whiteleg shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei), the species most farmed for human consumption. Its functional annotation, a substantial improvement over previous ones, is provided freely. RNA-Seq with Illumina HiSeq technology was used to analyze samples extracted from shrimp abdominal muscle, hepatopancreas, gills and pleopods. We used the Trinity...

Chickpea ranks third among the food legume crops production in the world. However, the genomic resources available for chickpea are still very limited. In the present study, the transcriptome of chickpea was sequenced with short reads on Illumina Genome Analyzer platform. We have assessed the effect of sequence quality, various assembly parameters and assembly programs on the final assembly out...

Background Cane toads (Rhinella marina) are an iconic invasive species introduced to 4 continents and well utilized for studies of rapid evolution in introduced environments. Despite the long introduction history of this species, its profound ecological impacts, and its utility for demonstrating evolutionary principles, genetic information is sparse. Here we produce a de novo transcriptome span...