RNA‐Seq of Agropyron mongolicum Keng in response to drought stress

Abstract Agropyron mongolicum Keng is the predominant perennial forage crop in the steppes of the Inner Mongolian Plateau, China. It is known to be tolerant to drought, low temperature and salinity, and is also a valuable resource for wheat improvement. However, the corresponding molecular mechanism underlying the adaptation to water shortage in A. mongolicum remains uncharacterized. In this study, the molecular responses of A. mongolicum were compared during drought stress. Two libraries prepared from control and drought‐stressed plants were sequenced via the Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform. A total of 44733 unigenes were obtained using de novo assembly software, of which 31944 had BLAST hits in the NCBI non‐redundant database. 22659 unigenes were assigned to gene ontology (GO), 8451 unigenes to clusters of orthologous groups (COG), 5178 unigenes to kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes (KEGG), and 20 850 unigenes to Swissprot database. There were significant differences in expression amongst a total of 2171 unigenes under drought‐stress conditions. These DEGs included 1300 GO terms and 83 KEGG pathways. Using next generation sequencing (NGS) technology, the transcriptome of A. mongolicum was studied; this provided important information for further gene expression and functional genomics studies, confirmed our results on the molecular mechanisms of drought response in A. mongolicum , and provides a useful resource for breeding of drought‐resistant crops.