Allele specific expression analysis on moricandia hybrids to identify factors governing CO2 concentration mechanisms

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Meng-Ying Lin, Urte Schluter and Andreas P M Weber

Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany

: J Plant Physiol Pathol

Abstract

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Plants with C3-C4 photosynthesis display lower CO2 compensation points than related C3 species and Kranz-like anatomy. C3-C4 intermediates do not have the C4 photosynthetic mechanism but possess an efficient system for recycling of photorespiratory released CO2 by transporting glycine into bundle sheath cells, where CO2 released from mitochondria can be efficiently recaptured by numerous, adjacent chloroplasts. Within the project, we would like to investigate the importance of different biochemical and anatomical features for the function of this specific photorespiratory cycle as well as their manifestation in the genomes of the plants. In the genus Moricandia, species with C3 and C3-C4 intermediate photosynthesis exist in close phylogenetic proximity and provide suitable materials to study early evolutionary steps of C4 photosynthesis. To explore Allele Specific Expression (ASE) regarding this specific CO2 concentration mechanism in Moricandia, six interspecific M. arvensis x M. moricandioides hybrids with diverse phenotypes as well as their parental species were selected for RNA-Seq analysis. In total, we obtained 54.97 GB of RNA-Seq data, with an average of 4.58 GB per sample. Parental species showed high aligning rate with an average of 92.33% to their own reference genome; on the other hand, reads from hybrids were about 75 to 85% mapped to each parental species. Approximately 120,000 SNP sites were examined by ASE analysis on every hybrid lines, 30% of the SNP sites were cis-regulatory variants, 7% of them were controlled by trans-acting regulators and others were with mixture of effects. Among hybrids, 3142 common cis-SNPs and 82 common trans-SNPs were found and mainly involving in cellular process (GO: 0009987) and metabolic process (GO: 0008152).

Biography

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Meng-Ying Lin is expertise in plant genomics field and she is doing Ph.D. at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany.