Resource of identified long non-coding RNAs and gene co-expression patterns in sweet sorghum during growth stages
The present analysis was performed to report long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and Novel protein-coding transcripts in sweet sorghum Rio and non-sweet inbred line PR22 using 98 RNA-Seq accessions from a previous study. We used our in-house pipeline, LncRAnalyzer [https://gitlab.com/nikhilshinde0909/LncRAnalyzer], to identify 8180 lncRNAs and 1614 NPCTs that were expressed in these two genotypes. To investigate their functional relationship with existing protein-coding genes, we performed gene co-expression analysis using the TO-GCN and WGCNA packages. These lncRNA-PCG associations highlight their possible role in stem sugar accumulation and internode development. Functional annotation of NPCTs was performed using the Trinotate pipeline. This study provides potential lncRNA and gene co-expression resources for designing targeted RNA-Seq panels to screen sorghum genotypes with enhanced sugar accumulation traits.