RNA-seq Analysis of Irrigated vs. Water Stressed Transcriptomes of Zea mays Cultivar Z59.

Abstract

Maize (Zea mays) is one of the important food crops of India with other potential uses in preparation of livestock feed and biofuel. But production of maize in India is low compared to top maize producing countries due to abiotic stresses (Ranum et al., 2014). Among abiotic stresses affecting maize production in India, drought is the major limiting factor. In spite of extensive research on drought tolerance in maize no tangible achievements could be made due to the extreme complexity associated with drought tolerance (Ashraf, 2010). Availability of the maize genome and high throughput genomic methods have provided new tools for addressing the complexity associated with drought tolerance (Zivy et al., 2015). We have chosen the drought tolerant genotype Z59 and are developing transcriptomic resources for better understanding of drought tolerance of this cultivar. As part of this work, we have sequenced the irrigated and water stressed transcriptomes of Z59 cultivar and the dataset is reported here.