Abstract
Ramie (Boehmeria nivea) is a perennial crop valued for its strong bast fibers. Unlike other major bast fiber crops, ramie fiber processing does not include retting, but does require degumming, suggesting distinctive features in pectin and the development and composition of fibers. A comprehensive transcriptome assembly of ramie has not been made available, to date. We obtained the sequence of RNA transcripts (RNA Seq) from the apical region of developing ramie stems and combined these with reads from public databases for a total of 157,621,051 paired-end reads (30.3 billion base pairs Gbp) used as input for de novo assembly, resulting in 70,721 scaffolds (≥200 base pairs (bp); N50 = 1798 bp). As evidence of the quality of the assembly, 36,535 scaffolds aligned to at least one Arabidopsis protein (BLASTP e-value ≤ 10−10). The resource described here for B. nivea will facilitate an improved understanding of bast fibers, cell wall, and middle lamella development in this and other comparative species.
Highlights
Ramie (Boehmeria nivea (L.) Gaud.) is as a perennial, herbaceous, semi-tropical species in the Urticaceae family
Ramie is valued primarily for its long, strong phloem fibers, which are used in textiles, most often as a blend with other types of fibers
We present here an assembly of all available transcript sequence reads of the B. nivea cultivar Zhongzhu 1, including novel RNA sequencing reads generated in our laboratory from the apex of developing shoots
Summary
Ramie (Boehmeria nivea (L.) Gaud.) is as a perennial, herbaceous, semi-tropical species in the Urticaceae family. It has been grown for at least 6000 years in Asia. Ramie is valued primarily for its long, strong phloem (i.e., bast) fibers, which are used in textiles, most often as a blend with other types of fibers. Ramie fibers have similar properties to other commercial bast fibers [3,4]. While linen and hemp harvesting rely on the microbial retting (degradation) of pectins, ramie is normally extracted by decorticating fresh stems to produce bark ribbons that are subsequently dried, scraped, and de-gummed. Extracts of various parts of the ramie plant have been reported to have beneficial medicinal properties, including antiviral and anti-inflammatory activities [5,6,7]
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