Project description:Photoperiod is a circannual signal measured by biological systems to align growth and reproduction with the seasons. To understand the effect of photoperiod of gene expression in Arabidopsis thaliana in the absence of exogenous sugar under constant light intensity, we performed time course mRNA-seq analysis on 13-day old seedlings across three photoperiods with triplicates to identify photoperiod-regulated genes.
Project description:In plants, reactive oxygen species and, more particularly, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) play a dual role as toxic by-products of normal cell metabolism and as regulatory molecules in stress perception and signal transduction. Peroxisomal catalases are an important sink for photorespiratory H2O2. Using ATH1 Affymetrix microarrays, expression profiles were compared between control and catalase-deficient Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) plants. Reduced catalase levels already provoked differences in nuclear gene expression under ambient growth conditions, and these effects were amplified by high light exposure in a sun simulator for 3 and 8 h. This genome-wide expression analysis allowed us to reveal the expression characteristics of complete pathways and functional categories during H2O2 stress. In total, 349 transcripts were significantly up-regulated by high light in catalase-deficient plants and 88 were down-regulated. From this data set, H2O2 was inferred to play a key role in the transcriptional up-regulation of small heat shock proteins during high light stress. In addition, several transcription factors and candidate regulatory genes involved in H2O2 transcriptional gene networks were identified. Comparisons with other publicly available transcriptome data sets of abiotically stressed Arabidopsis revealed an important intersection with H2O2-deregulated genes, positioning elevated H2O2 levels as an important signal within abiotic stress-induced gene expression. Finally, analysis of transcriptional changes in a combination of a genetic (catalase deficiency) and an environmental (high light) perturbation identified a transcriptional cluster that was strongly and rapidly induced by high light in control plants, but impaired in catalase-deficient plants. This cluster comprises the complete known anthocyanin regulatory and biosynthetic pathway, together with genes of hitherto unknown function.
Project description:The goal of this project is to compare the primary metabolite profile in different tissue types of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Specifically, plants were grown hydroponically under the long-day (16hr light/day) condition at 21C. Tissue samples, including leaves, inflorescences, and roots were harvest 4 1/2 weeks post sowing. Untargeted primary metabolites profiling was carried out using GCTOF.