RNA-seq data of Oryza sativa cultivar Kuku Belang under PEG treatment.

Drought stress is the main abiotic factor affecting rice production. Rain-fed upland rice which is grown on unbounded fields and totally dependent on rainfall for moisture is more prone to drought stress compared to rice from other ecosystems. However, upland rice has adapted to this limited water condition, thus are more drought tolerant than rice from other ecosystems. We performed the first transcriptome sequencing of drought tolerant indica upland rice cultivar Kuku Belang to identify differentially expressed genes related to drought tolerance mechanism. Raw reads for non-treated and PEG-treated Oryza sativa subspecies indica cv. Kuku Belang were deposited in the NCBI SRA database with accession number SRP074520 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra?term=SRP074520).