NCGR_opal
Meiosis-specific gene discovery in plants: RNA-Seq applied to isolated Arabidopsis male meiocytes
Background: Meiosis is a critical process in the reproduction and life cycle  of flowering plants in which homologous chromosomes pair, synapse, recombine  and segregate. Understanding meiosis will not only advance our knowledge of the  mechanisms of genetic recombination, but also has great application in crop  improvement. Despite the tremendous progress in the past decade in other model  organisms (e.g., Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Drosophila melanogaster), the  global identification of meiotic genes in flowering plants has remained a  challenge due to the lack of efficient methods to collect pure meiocytes for  analyzing the temporal and spatial gene expression patterns during meiosis, and  for the sensitive identification and quantitation of novel genes.  Results: A high-throughput approach to identify meiosis-specific genes by  combining isolated meiocytes, RNA-Seq, bioinformatic and statistical analysis  pipelines was developed. By analyzing the studied genes that have a meiosis  function, a pipeline for identifying meiosis-specific genes has been defined. More  than 1,000 genes that are specifically or preferentially expressed in meiocytes  have been identified as candidate meiosis-specific genes. A group of 55 genes  that have mitochondrial genome origins and a significant number of transposable  element genes (1032) were also found to have up-regulated expression levels in  meiocytes.  Conclusion: These findings advance our understanding of meiotic genes,  gene expression and regulation, especially the transcript profiles of MGI genes  and TE genes, and provide a framework for functional analysis of genes in  meiosis.