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Article
Genes and Small RNA Transcripts Exhibit Dosage-Dependent Expression Pattern in Maize Copy-Number Alterations
Genetics
  • Tao Zuo, Iowa State University
  • Jianbo Zhang, Iowa State University
  • Andrew Lithio, Iowa State University
  • Sudhansu Dash, Iowa State University
  • David F. Weber, Illinois State University
  • Roger Wise, United States Department of Agriculture
  • Dan Nettleton, Iowa State University
  • Thomas Peterson, Iowa State University
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Publication Date
7-1-2016
DOI
10.1534/genetics.116.188235
Abstract

Copy-number alterations are widespread in animal and plant genomes, but their immediate impact on gene expression is still unclear. In animals, copy-number alterations usually exhibit dosage effects, except for sex chromosomes which tend to be dosage compensated. In plants, genes within small duplications (<100 kb) often exhibit dosage-dependent expression, whereas large duplications (>50 Mb) are more often dosage compensated. However, little or nothing is known about expression in moderately-sized (1–50 Mb) segmental duplications, and about the response of small RNAs to dosage change. Here, we compared maize (Zea mays) plants with two, three, and four doses of a 14.6-Mb segment of chromosome 1 that contains ∼300 genes. Plants containing the duplicated segment exhibit dosage-dependent effects on ear length and flowering time. Transcriptome analyses using GeneChip and RNA-sequencing methods indicate that most expressed genes and unique small RNAs within the duplicated segments exhibit dosage-dependent transcript levels. We conclude that dosage effect is the predominant regulatory response for both genes and unique small RNA transcripts in the segmental dosage series we tested. To our knowledge this is the first analysis of small RNA expression in plant gene dosage variants. Because segmental duplications comprise a significant proportion of eukaryotic genomes, these findings provide important new insight into the regulation of genes and small RNAs in response to dosage changes.

Comments

This article is from Genetics 203 (2016): 1133, doi: 10.1534/genetics.116.188235.

Rights
Works produced by employees of the U.S. Government as part of their official duties are not copyrighted within the U.S. The content of this document is not copyrighted.
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Citation Information
Tao Zuo, Jianbo Zhang, Andrew Lithio, Sudhansu Dash, et al.. "Genes and Small RNA Transcripts Exhibit Dosage-Dependent Expression Pattern in Maize Copy-Number Alterations" Genetics Vol. 203 Iss. 3 (2016) p. 1133 - 1147
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/thomas-peterson/10/