design: Total RNA was extracted from three biological replicates of control (CK) and saline-alkali treated (Sa) plants (48 h post-treatment). RNA library construction and sequencing were performed by Novogene (Beijing, China) on the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 platform (Illumina, USA). Raw data were processed with Fastp software (v. 0.19.7) for quality control, and clean reads were aligned to the cucumber genome (CLv2.0) using HISAT2 (v. 2.0.5) with default parameters.