Dissecting the developmental transcriptomes of rice

Transcriptional programs are important for the development of complex eukaryotic organisms. Suites of genes expressed with temporal and spatial controls by regulatory networks in response to environmental cues are the cornerstone for achieving the specification of morphology and physiology of the tissue or organ systems. Thus, an important issue of developmental biology is to define the subsets of expressed genes and their expression patterns that are related to the organ or tissue system. Rice is a model plant for cereal genome research. Although large amounts of data of whole genome expression have been generated in recent years in rice, the majority of the studies were designed to identify differentially expressed genes between controls and treatments with certain experimental conditions such as biotic, abiotic or light, or to investigate the comparative expression patterns between wild type and mutants of certain genes. Only in a few cases were the datasets designed for studying the transcriptomes of a limited number of organs and cell types. Thus, there is still insufficiency in the available datasets that would allow for the establishment of expression patterns for suits of genes during the developmental processes of rice.

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Wang L, Xie W, Chen Y, Tang W, Yang J, Ye R, Liu L, Lin Y, Xu C, Xiao J, Zhang Q