Full-length transcriptomes of 25 grassland plant species

Grasslands are essential, biodiverse ecosystems providing critical ecosystem services. Despite their ecological and economic value, transcriptomic resources for wild grassland species to support eco-evolutionary and functional genomic studies remain limited. Here, we present full-length transcriptomes for shoot tissue from 25 wild grassland plant species collected from a long-term biodiversity experiment (the Jena Experiment). Using PacBio Iso-Seq technology, we generated a total of 522.45 million subreads, which were assembled into unique transcripts for each species independently. This resulted in an average of 49,180 transcripts per species, of which 68.6% were successfully annotated using the Swiss-Prot database. Furthermore, 40.3% of the transcripts contained complete open reading frames (ORFs), while 31.4% had incomplete ORFs. More than 36.8% of the transcripts were identified as non-coding RNAs. On average, 5.08% of the bases across all transcriptomes were flagged as repetitive elements. This dataset offers a valuable full-length transcriptomic resource for studying gene expression, alternative splicing, and evolutionary patterns in grassland species, paving the way for future research in functional genomics and conservation.