Comparative Transcriptomics Reveals 129 Transcripts That Are Temporally Regulated during Anther Development and Meiotic Progression in Both Bread Wheat (Triticum aestivum) and Rice (Oryza sativa)
Meiosis is a specialised type of cell division in sexually reproducing organisms that generates genetic diversity and prevents chromosome doubling in successive generations. The last decade has seen forward and reverse genetic approaches identifying many genes in the plant kingdom which highlight similarities and differences in the mechanics of meiosis between taxonomic kingdoms. We present here a high throughput in silico analysis, using bread wheat and rice, which has generated a list of 129 transcripts containing genes with meiotic roles and some which are currently unknown. 1. Introduction Since its inception over a decade ago, microarray technology has significantly increased its application-base and popularity. Initially developed to measure expression levels of given transcripts, microarrays provide a snapshot of the dynamic cellular transcriptomes which have been extracted from an isolated tissue-type. A common application of this technology is the comparison of the same tissue-type at the same stage of development between an experimental treatment or diseased tissue compared to a wild-type control. However, data from tissue time-courses/developmental series can also be generated with microarrays and have been reported in several species investigating different biological processes. Meiosis is one such biological process and results in the formation of four genetically unique gametes, hence promoting genetic variation. Furthermore, meiosis is essential in sexually reproducing organisms as it prevents chromosome doubling in successive generations. Using microarray or SOLiD RNA-seq platforms, various studies have investigated the meiotic transcriptomes (often time-course experiments) in a variety of kingdoms. Examples include yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) [1], Drosophila [2], Caenorhabditis elegans [3], rat (Rattus rattus) [4], mouse (Mus musculus) [5], bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) [6], and, more recently, rice (Oryza sativa L.) [7] and Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana L.) [8]. While our understanding of meiosis in some nonplant systems such as budding yeast is extensive, our knowledge of meiosis in plants is less advanced. Nonetheless, in the past 10 years (further to what has been achieved in Arabidopsis and rice), there has been an ongoing research effort towards building our knowledge across several different plant species, including barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) [9], wheat (T. aestivum) [10–12], maize (Zea mays L.) [13], and tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) [14]. With some exceptions (for example, where a gene has been
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