PRJNA171024
RNAseq of non-robust A. thaliana – Pol V mutant and HSP90-reduced seedlings
The aim of this study is to compare expression signatures of wild-type plants with plants showing reduced phenotypic robustness - plants impaired in capacitors RNA polymerase V (Pol V) or HSP90 function. In Pol V mutants (nrpe1 formerly drd3-1), we observed a significant increase in expression space, which we defined as the number of bases covered by randomly drawn read-depth adjusted set of reads. Several intergenic regions and transposable elements were upregulated in pol V mutants, which provides a plausible mechanism to release cryptic genetic variants. Despite independence of the two capacitors Pol V and HSP90, we observed a significant overlap of differentially expressed genes, mostly comprising stress response, suggesting that loss of robustness is stressful.