Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2015, 16, 12855-12870; doi:10.3390/ijms160612855 OPEN ACCESS International Journal of Molecular Sciences ISSN 1422-0067 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijms Article De Novo Characterization of Flower Bud Transcriptomes and the Development of EST-SSR Markers for the Endangered Tree Tapiscia sinensis Xiao-Jun Zhou 1,2, Yue-Yue Wang 1, Ya-Nan Xu 1, Rong-Shan Yan 1, Peng Zhao 1 and Wen-Zhe Liu 1,* 1 School of Life Sciences, Northwest University, 229 Taibai Bei Road, Xi’an 710069, China; E-Mails:
[email protected] (X.-J.Z.);
[email protected] (Y.-Y.W.);
[email protected] (Y.-N.X.);
[email protected] (R.-S.Y.);
[email protected] (P.Z.) 2 School of Life Sciences, Luoyang Normal University, 71 Longmen Road, Luoyang 471022, China * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail:
[email protected]; Tel.: +86-29-8830-2184; Fax: +86-29-8830-3572. Academic Editor: Marcello Iriti Received: 15 April 2015 / Accepted: 27 May 2015 / Published: 5 June 2015 Abstract: Tapiscia sinensis Oliv (Tapisciaceae) is an endangered species native to China famous for its androdioecious breeding system. However, there is a lack of genomic and transcriptome data on this species. In this study, the Tapiscia sinensis transcriptomes from two types of sex flower buds were sequenced. A total of 97,431,176 clean reads were assembled into 52,169 unigenes with an average length of 1116 bp. Through similarity comparison with known protein databases, 36,662 unigenes (70.27%) were annotated. A total of 10,002 (19.17%) unigenes were assigned to 124 pathways using the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway database.