The first draft of the pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. cv. Asha) genome with 511 Mbp of assembled sequence information has low genome coverage of about sixty percent. Here we present an improved version of this genome with 648.2 Mbp of assembled sequence of this popular pigeonpea variety, which is liked by the millers and has resistance to fusarium wilt and sterility mosaic diseases. With the addition of 137 Mb of assembled sequence information the present version has the highest available genome coverage of pigeonpea till date. We predicted 56,888 protein-coding genes of which 54,286 (96.7%) were functionally annotated. In the improved genome assembly we identified 158,432 SSR loci, designed flanking primers for 85,296 of these and validated them in-silico by e-PCR. The raw data used for the improvement of genome assembly are available in the SRA database of NCBI with accession numbers SRR5922904, SRR5922905, SRR5922906, SRR5922907. The genome sequence update has been deposited at DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession AFSP00000000, and the version described in this paper is the second version (AFSP02000000).

Tinospora cordifolia, commonly known as “Giloe” in India, is a shrub belonging to the family Menispermaceae. It is an important medicinal plant known for its antipyretic, anti-inflammatory, antispasmodic, and antidiabetic properties and is used in the treatment of jaundice, gout, and rheumatism. Despite its economic importance, the limited information related to its genomic resources prohibits its judicious exploitation through molecular breeding or biotechnological approaches. In this study, we generated a meta-transcriptome assembly of 43,090 non-redundant transcripts by merging the RNASeq data obtained from Roche 454 GS-FLX, and Illumina platforms, and report the first transcriptome-based database for simple sequence repeats and transcription factors (“TinoTranscriptDB” (Tinospora cordifolia Transcriptome Database)). We annotated 26,716 (62%) of the total transcripts successfully from National Center for Biotechnology Information non-redundant protein (NCBI-NR), gene ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), Swiss-Prot, and Pfam databases. This database contains information of 2620 perfect simple sequence repeats (P-SSRs) with a relative abundance of 340.12 (loci/Mb), and relative density of 6309.29 (bp/Mb). Excluding mono-nucleotides, the most abundant SSR motifs were tri-nucleotides (54.31%), followed by di-nucleotides (37.51%), tetra-nucleotides (4.54%), penta-nucleotides (3.16%) and hexa-nucleotides (0.45%). Additionally, we also identified 4,311 transcription factors (TFs) and categorized them into 55 sub-families. This database is expected to fill the gap in genomic resource availability in T. cordifolia and thus accelerate molecular breeding and related functional and other applied studies aimed towards genetic improvements of T. cordifolia and related species.