RESEARCH ARTICLE De Novo Assembly and Characterization of

Black pepper is one of the most popular and oldest spices in the world and valued for its pungent constituent alkaloids. Pinerine is the main bioactive compound in pepper alkaloids, which perform unique physiological functions. However, the mechanisms of piperine syn-thesis are poorly understood. This study is the first to describe the fruit transcriptome of black pepper by sequencing on Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform. A total of 56,281,710 raw reads were obtained and assembled. From these raw reads, 44,061 unigenes with an aver-age length of 1,345 nt were generated. During functional annotation, 40,537 unigenes were annotated in Gene Ontology categories, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes path-ways, Swiss-Prot database, and Nucleotide Collection (NR/NT) database. In addition, 8,196 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) were detected. In a detailed analysis of the tran-scriptome, housekeeping genes for quantitative polymerase chain reaction internal control, polymorphic SSRs, and lysine/ornithine metabolism-related genes were identified. These results validated the availability of our database. Our study could provide useful data for fur-ther research on piperine synthesis in black pepper