Abstract
Information on the transcriptomic changes that occur within sclerotia of Aspergillus flavus during its sexual cycle is very limited and warrants further research. The findings will broaden our knowledge of the biology of A. flavus and can provide valuable insights in the development or deployment of non-toxigenic strains as biocontrol agents against aflatoxigenic strains. This article presents transcriptomic datasets included in our research article entitled, "Development of sexual structures influences metabolomic and transcriptomic profiles in Aspergillus flavus" [1], which utilized transcriptomics to identify possible genes and gene clusters associated with sexual reproduction and fertilization in A. flavus. RNA was extracted from sclerotia of a high fertility cross (Hi-Fert-Mated), a low fertility cross (Lo-Fert-Mated), and unmated strains (Hi-Fert-Unmated and Lo-Fert-Unmated) of A. flavus collected immediately after crossing and at every two weeks until eight weeks of incubation on mixed cereal agar at 30 °C in continuous darkness (n = 4 replicates from each treatment for each time point; 80 total). Raw sequencing reads obtained on an Illumina NovaSeq 6000 were deposited in NCBI's Sequence Read Archive (SRA) repository under BioProject accession number PRJNA789260. Reads were mapped to the A. flavus NRRL 3357 genome (assembly JCVI-afl1-v2.0; GCA_000006275.2) using STAR software. Differential gene expression analyses, functional analyses, and weighted gene co-expression network analysis were performed using DESeq2 R packages. The raw and analyzed data presented in this article could be reused for comparisons with other datasets to obtain transcriptional differences among strains of A. flavus or closely related species. The data can also be used for further investigation of the molecular basis of different processes involved in sexual reproduction and sclerotia fertility in A. flavus.