Project description:Plants grow continuously and undergo numerous changes in their vegetative morphology and physiology during their life span. The molecular basis of these changes is largely unknown. To provide a more comprehensive picture of shoot development in Arabidopsis, microarray analysis was used to profile the mRNA content of shoot apices of different ages, as well as leaf primordia and fully-expanded leaves from 6 different positions on the shoot, in early-flowering and late-flowering genotypes. This extensive dataset provides a new and unexpectedly complex picture of shoot development in Arabidopsis. At any given time, the pattern of gene expression is different in every leaf on the shoot, and reflects the activity at least 6 developmental programs. Three of these are specific to individual leaves (leaf maturation, leaf aging, leaf senescence), two occur at the level of the shoot apex (vegetative phase change, floral induction), and one involves the entire shoot (shoot aging). Our results demonstrate that vegetative development is a much more dynamic process that previously imagined, and provide new insights into the underlying mechanism of this process.
Project description:Gene expression in the shoot apex of 3-week old Arabidopsis thaliana (ecotype Col-0) was compared to DRB2 (AT2G28380) null mutants.
Project description:Cellular differentiation is associated with changes in transcript populations. Accurate quantification of transcriptomes during development can thus provide global insights into differentiation processes including the fundamental specification and differentiation events operating during plant embryogenesis. However, multiple technical challenges have limited the ability to obtain high quality early embryonic transcriptomes, namely the low amount of RNA obtainable and contamination from surrounding endosperm and seed-coat tissues. We compared the performance of three low-input mRNA sequencing (mRNA-seq) library preparation kits on 0.1 to 5 nanograms (ng) of total RNA isolated from Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) embryos and identified a low-cost method with superior performance. This mRNA-seq method was then used to profile the transcriptomes of Arabidopsis embryos across eight developmental stages. By comprehensively comparing embryonic and post-embryonic transcriptomes, we found that embryonic transcriptomes do not resemble any other plant tissue we analyzed. Moreover, transcriptome clustering analyses revealed the presence of four distinct phases of embryogenesis which are enriched in specific biological processes. We also compared zygotic embryo transcriptomes with publicly available somatic embryo transcriptomes. Strikingly, we found little resemblance between zygotic embryos and somatic embryos derived from late-staged zygotic embryos suggesting that somatic and zygotic embryo transcriptomes are distinct from each other. In addition to the biological insights gained from our systematic characterization of the Arabidopsis embryonic transcriptome, we provide a data-rich resource for the community to explore.