curcuma longa l. ( belonging to the family zingiberaceae ) is a vegetatively propagated , polyploid crop cultivated mostly in southeast asia , commonly known as turmeric is widely used as a spice , natural food dye and preservative in asian countries . turmeric has multifunctional use in aromatherapy , cosmetics , medicine , dye and also in food industry . several cultivars in turmeric has been released having different phytochemical properties like high essential oil yield , high curcumin content , and rhizome yield but their genetic analysis has yet to be done . in this study , we accomplished reference based transcriptome assembly of kedaram , an elite cultivar of turmeric collected from iisr , kerala for its high yielding and high curcumin content through next generation sequencing . fresh rhizomes of cultivar kedaram was collected from centre of biotechnology , siksha o anusandhan university , bhubaneswar , india . fresh rhizome was harvested , washed properly with distilled water followed by ice cold 95% ethanol . after washing rhizome was chopped and suspended in rna later solution and shifted to   80  c till further analysis . rna extraction and transcriptome library preparation were accomplished using illumina truseq rna library protocol summarized in we have done resequencing having 75  bp paired - end sequencing using illumina nextseq 500 platform . mapping of raw reads with the reference sequence ( previous de novo transcriptome sequence of turmeric ) was done using tophat-2.0.13   tool . we summarized detailed information on the reference based transcriptome assembly of an elite turmeric cultivar kedaramin ( table 1 ) . the transcriptome assembly produced 39,554 transcripts , having n50 value of 1221 and median transcript length of 860 . we annotated the transcripts using multiple databases like viridiplantae kingdom protein sequences ( from uniprot protein database ) , eukaryotic orthologous groups of proteins ( kog ) , plantcyc enzyme sequences ( from pmn database ) , kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes ( kegg ) database . to our understanding , this is the first transcriptome data for an elite turmeric cultivar kedaram collected from iisr , kerala . the transcriptome data of kedaram can be effectively used for developing genetic markers like ssrs and snps which could be used for identification of kedaram from its closely related cultivars . fresh rhizomes of cultivar kedaram was collected from centre of biotechnology , siksha o anusandhan university , bhubaneswar , india . fresh rhizome was harvested , washed properly with distilled water followed by ice cold 95% ethanol . after washing rhizome was chopped and suspended in rna later solution and shifted to   80  c till further analysis . rna extraction and transcriptome library preparation were accomplished using illumina truseq rna library protocol summarized in we have done resequencing having 75  bp paired - end sequencing using illumina nextseq 500 platform . a total of 1  gb of raw data was resulted . mapping of raw reads with the reference sequence ( previous de novo transcriptome sequence of turmeric ) was done using tophat-2.0.13   tool . we summarized detailed information on the reference based transcriptome assembly of an elite turmeric cultivar kedaramin ( table 1 ) . the transcriptome assembly produced 39,554 transcripts , having n50 value of 1221 and median transcript length of 860 . we annotated the transcripts using multiple databases like viridiplantae kingdom protein sequences ( from uniprot protein database ) , eukaryotic orthologous groups of proteins ( kog ) , plantcyc enzyme sequences ( from pmn database ) , kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes ( kegg ) database . to our understanding , this is the first transcriptome data for an elite turmeric cultivar kedaram collected from iisr , kerala . the transcriptome data of kedaram can be effectively used for developing genetic markers like ssrs and snps which could be used for identification of kedaram from its closely related cultivars .
curcuma longa l. ( turmeric ) , of the family zingiberaceae , is one of the economically as well as medicinally important plant species . 
 it is a sterile , polyploid and vegetatively propagated spice crop cultivated usually in southeast asia . in the current study 
 , we carried out re - sequencing through transcriptome profiling of curcuma longa cv . 
 kedaram ( cl_ked_6 ) . 
 we acquired a total of 1  gb raw data by resequencing through paired - end sequencing using nextseq 500 platform . 
 the raw data obtained in this study can be accessible in ncbi database with accession number of srr3928562 with bioproject accession number prjna324755 . 
 cufflinks-2.2.1 tool was used for transcriptome assembly which resulted in 39,554 numbers of transcripts . 
 the transcript length ranged from 76 to 15,568 , having n50 value of 1221 and median transcript length of 860 . 
 we annotated the transcripts using multiple databases . 
 this data will be beneficial for studying sequence variations particularly snps between cultivars of turmeric towards authentic identification and discovery of novel functional transcripts in kedaram .