We isolated total RNA from 1115 samples from 695 plant species representing 324 families collected from the field, botanical gardens, greenhouses, growth chambers and axenic cultures. No specific permits were required for the collection of samples as the minority of samples collected directly from the field were taken from public land. None of these samples represent endangered or protected species. Samples included non-vascular plants such as algae, hornworts and mosses, and vascular plants including lycopods, ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms. We isolated total RNA from tissues categorized into one of eight tissue types, including: i) leaf (489 samples), ii) flower (4), iii) fruit (10), iv) buds (leaf or flower) (15), v) shoot/stem (7), vi) below-ground (12; 10 roots, 2 bulbs), vii) mixed tissues (two or more of tissues i–vi) (276) and viii) algal cells (274). Care was taken to properly differentiate and categorize tissue types, but some samples inevitably had overlapping cell types with other tissue types and we therefore view differences among tissues as conservative patterns. For a subset of 71 species, we also tested the effects of tissue age on RNA quality and sequencing success by comparing “young” freshly expanding leaves and “mature” fully expanded but non-senescing leaves collected from tissue that was pooled from at least two healthy plants grown together in the greenhouse. For these samples we used approximately 0.1–0.5 g of tissue from young leaves and roughly 2× as much (up to 1 g) for old leaves; more tissue was required from mature leaves to achieve equivalent concentrations as young leaves (see Results). The complete data set, including the list of all samples, tissues and data, is provided in Table S1 .
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