72-h diurnal RNA-seq analysis of fully expanded third leaves from maize, sorghum, and foxtail millet at 3-h resolution.

The purpose of this data set is to capture the complete diurnal (i.e., daily) transcriptome of fully expanded third leaves from the C4 panacoid grasses sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), maize (Zea mays), and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) with RNA-seq transcriptome profiling. These data are the cornerstone of a larger project that examined the conservation and divergence of gene expression networks within these crop plants. This data set focuses on temporal changes in gene expression to identify the network architecture responsible for daily regulation of plant growth and metabolic activities. The power of this data set is fine temporal resolution combined with continuous sampling over multiple days. The data set is 72 individual RNA-seq samples representing 24 time course samples each for sorghum, maize, and foxtail millet plants cultivated in a growth chamber under equal intervals of light and darkness. The 24 samples are separated by 3-h intervals so that the data set is a fine scale 72-h analysis of gene expression in the leaves of each plant type. FASTQ files from Illumina sequencing are available at the National Center for Biotechnology Information Sequence Read Archive.