Abstract
Elettaria cardamomum (L.) Maton, or small cardamom referred as 'queen of spices', is a perennial herbaceous rhizomatous monocot of the family Zingiberaceae. Cardamom seeds and fruits are the economically significant parts and effectively used as a traditional medicine, food additive and flavoring agent. In the present study, using Ion Proton next generation sequencing technology we performed the small RNA sequencing, conserved and novel miRNA predictions of a wild and five cultivar genotypes of cardamom. Small RNA sequencing generated a total of 5,451,328 and 2,756,250 raw reads for wild and cultivar cardamom respectively. The raw data was submitted to SRA database of NCBI under the accession numbers and SRX2273863 (wild) and SRX2273862 (cultivars). The raw reads were quality filtered and predicted conserved and novel miRNAs for wild and cultivar cardamom. The predicted miRNAs, miRNA-targets and functional annotations might provide valuable insights into differences between wild progenitor and cultivated cardamom.