Open AccessGlobal Identification of Genes Specific for Rice Meiosis
Author(s) -
Bingwei Zhang,
Meng Xu,
Shiquan Bian,
Lili Hou,
Ding Tang,
Yafei Li,
Min Gu,
Zhukuan Cheng,
Hengxiu Yu
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0137399
Subject(s) - meiosis , biology , genetics , gene , homologous chromosome , arabidopsis , mutant , transcriptome , gene expression
The leptotene-zygotene transition is a major step in meiotic progression during which pairing between homologous chromosomes is initiated and double strand breaks occur. OsAM1 , a homologue of maize AM1 and Arabidopsis SWI1 , encodes a protein with a coiled-coil domain in its central region that is required for the leptotene-zygotene transition during rice meiosis. To gain more insight into the role of OsAM1 in rice meiosis and identify additional meiosis-specific genes, we characterized the transcriptomes of young panicles of Osam1 mutant and wild-type rice plants using RNA-Seq combined with bioinformatic and statistical analyses. As a result, a total of 25,750 and 28,455 genes were expressed in young panicles of wild-type and Osam1 mutant plants, respectively, and 4,400 differentially expressed genes (DEGs; log 2 Ratio ≥ 1, FDR ≤ 0.05) were identified. Of these DEGs, four known rice meiosis-specific genes were detected, and 22 new putative meiosis-related genes were found by mapping these DEGs to reference biological pathways in the KEGG database. We identified eight additional well-conserved OsAM1 - responsive rice meiotic genes by comparing our RNA-Seq data with known meiotic genes in Arabidopsis and fission yeast.