scholarly journals Overexpression of a methyl-CpG-binding protein gene OsMBD707 leads to larger tiller angles and reduced photoperiod sensitivity in rice

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mengyu Qu ◽  
Zhujian Zhang ◽  
Tingmin Liang ◽  
Peipei Niu ◽  
Mingji Wu ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Methyl-CpG-binding domain (MBD) proteins play important roles in epigenetic gene regulation, and have diverse molecular, cellular, and biological functions in plants. MBD proteins have been functionally characterized in various plant species, including Arabidopsis, wheat, maize, and tomato. In rice, 17 sequences were bioinformatically predicted as putative MBD proteins. However, very little is known regarding the function of MBD proteins in rice. Results We explored the expression patterns of the rice OsMBD family genes and identified 13 OsMBDs with active expression in various rice tissues. We further characterized the function of a rice class I MBD protein OsMBD707, and demonstrated that OsMBD707 is constitutively expressed and localized in the nucleus. Transgenic rice overexpressing OsMBD707 displayed larger tiller angles and reduced photoperiod sensitivity—delayed flowering under short day (SD) and early flowering under long day (LD). RNA-seq analysis revealed that overexpression of OsMBD707 led to reduced photoperiod sensitivity in rice and to expression changes in flowering regulator genes in the Ehd1-Hd3a/RFT1 pathway. Conclusion The results of this study suggested that OsMBD707 plays important roles in rice growth and development, and should lead to further studies on the functions of OsMBD proteins in growth, development, or other molecular, cellular, and biological processes in rice.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mengyu Qu ◽  
Zhujian Zhang ◽  
Tingmin Liang ◽  
Peipei Niu ◽  
Mingji Wu ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Methyl-CpG-binding domain (MBD) proteins play important roles in epigenetic gene regulation, and have diverse molecular, cellular, and biological functions in plants. MBD proteins have been functionally characterized in various plant species, including Arabidopsis, wheat, maize, and tomato. In rice, 17 sequences were bioinformatically predicted as putative MBD proteins. However, very little is known regarding the function of MBD proteins in rice.Results: We explored the expression patterns of the rice OsMBD family genes and identified 13 OsMBDs with active expression in various rice tissues. We further characterized the function of a rice class I MBD protein OsMBD707, and demonstrated that OsMBD707 is constitutively expressed and localized in the nucleus. Transgenic rice overexpressing OsMBD707 displayed larger tiller angles and reduced photoperiod sensitivity—delayed flowering under short day (SD) and early flowering under long day (LD). RNA-seq analysis revealed that overexpression of OsMBD707 led to reduced photoperiod sensitivity in rice through regulating expression of key flowering regulator genes in the Ehd1-Hd3a/RFT1 pathway.Conclusion: The results of this study demonstrated that OsMBD707 plays important roles in rice growth and development, and should lead to further studies on the functions of OsMBD proteins in growth, development, or other molecular, cellular, and biological processes in rice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Xu ◽  
Xiangdong Liu ◽  
Qiming Dai

Abstract Background Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) represents one of the most common inherited heart diseases. To identify key molecules involved in the development of HCM, gene expression patterns of the heart tissue samples in HCM patients from multiple microarray and RNA-seq platforms were investigated. Methods The significant genes were obtained through the intersection of two gene sets, corresponding to the identified differentially expressed genes (DEGs) within the microarray data and within the RNA-Seq data. Those genes were further ranked using minimum-Redundancy Maximum-Relevance feature selection algorithm. Moreover, the genes were assessed by three different machine learning methods for classification, including support vector machines, random forest and k-Nearest Neighbor. Results Outstanding results were achieved by taking exclusively the top eight genes of the ranking into consideration. Since the eight genes were identified as candidate HCM hallmark genes, the interactions between them and known HCM disease genes were explored through the protein–protein interaction (PPI) network. Most candidate HCM hallmark genes were found to have direct or indirect interactions with known HCM diseases genes in the PPI network, particularly the hub genes JAK2 and GADD45A. Conclusions This study highlights the transcriptomic data integration, in combination with machine learning methods, in providing insight into the key hallmark genes in the genetic etiology of HCM.


Genes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 311
Author(s):  
Zhenqiu Liu

Single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) is a powerful tool to measure the expression patterns of individual cells and discover heterogeneity and functional diversity among cell populations. Due to variability, it is challenging to analyze such data efficiently. Many clustering methods have been developed using at least one free parameter. Different choices for free parameters may lead to substantially different visualizations and clusters. Tuning free parameters is also time consuming. Thus there is need for a simple, robust, and efficient clustering method. In this paper, we propose a new regularized Gaussian graphical clustering (RGGC) method for scRNA-seq data. RGGC is based on high-order (partial) correlations and subspace learning, and is robust over a wide-range of a regularized parameter λ. Therefore, we can simply set λ=2 or λ=log(p) for AIC (Akaike information criterion) or BIC (Bayesian information criterion) without cross-validation. Cell subpopulations are discovered by the Louvain community detection algorithm that determines the number of clusters automatically. There is no free parameter to be tuned with RGGC. When evaluated with simulated and benchmark scRNA-seq data sets against widely used methods, RGGC is computationally efficient and one of the top performers. It can detect inter-sample cell heterogeneity, when applied to glioblastoma scRNA-seq data.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 2006
Author(s):  
Mi Jin Kim ◽  
Jinhong Park ◽  
Jinho Kim ◽  
Ji-Young Kim ◽  
Mi-Jin An ◽  
...  

Mercury is one of the detrimental toxicants that can be found in the environment and exists naturally in different forms; inorganic and organic. Human exposure to inorganic mercury, such as mercury chloride, occurs through air pollution, absorption of food or water, and personal care products. This study aimed to investigate the effect of HgCl2 on cell viability, cell cycle, apoptotic pathway, and alters of the transcriptome profiles in human non-small cell lung cancer cells, H1299. Our data show that HgCl2 treatment causes inhibition of cell growth via cell cycle arrest at G0/G1- and S-phase. In addition, HgCl2 induces apoptotic cell death through the caspase-3-independent pathway. Comprehensive transcriptome analysis using RNA-seq indicated that cellular nitrogen compound metabolic process, cellular metabolism, and translation for biological processes-related gene sets were significantly up- and downregulated by HgCl2 treatment. Interestingly, comparative gene expression patterns by RNA-seq indicated that mitochondrial ribosomal proteins were markedly altered by low-dose of HgCl2 treatment. Altogether, these data show that HgCl2 induces apoptotic cell death through the dysfunction of mitochondria.


Plants ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 1465
Author(s):  
Ramon de Koning ◽  
Raphaël Kiekens ◽  
Mary Esther Muyoka Toili ◽  
Geert Angenon

Raffinose family oligosaccharides (RFO) play an important role in plants but are also considered to be antinutritional factors. A profound understanding of the galactinol and RFO biosynthetic gene families and the expression patterns of the individual genes is a prerequisite for the sustainable reduction of the RFO content in the seeds, without compromising normal plant development and functioning. In this paper, an overview of the annotation and genetic structure of all galactinol- and RFO biosynthesis genes is given for soybean and common bean. In common bean, three galactinol synthase genes, two raffinose synthase genes and one stachyose synthase gene were identified for the first time. To discover the expression patterns of these genes in different tissues, two expression atlases have been created through re-analysis of publicly available RNA-seq data. De novo expression analysis through an RNA-seq study during seed development of three varieties of common bean gave more insight into the expression patterns of these genes during the seed development. The results of the expression analysis suggest that different classes of galactinol- and RFO synthase genes have tissue-specific expression patterns in soybean and common bean. With the obtained knowledge, important galactinol- and RFO synthase genes that specifically play a key role in the accumulation of RFOs in the seeds are identified. These candidate genes may play a pivotal role in reducing the RFO content in the seeds of important legumes which could improve the nutritional quality of these beans and would solve the discomforts associated with their consumption.


Foods ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 360
Author(s):  
Guodong Rao ◽  
Jianguo Zhang ◽  
Xiaoxia Liu ◽  
Xue Li ◽  
Chenhe Wang

Olive oil has been favored as high-quality edible oil because it contains balanced fatty acids (FAs) and high levels of minor components. The contents of FAs and minor components are variable in olive fruits of different color at harvest time, which render it difficult to determine the optimal harvest strategy for olive oil producing. Here, we combined metabolome, Pacbio Iso-seq, and Illumina RNA-seq transcriptome to investigate the association between metabolites and gene expression of olive fruits at harvest time. A total of 34 FAs, 12 minor components, and 181 other metabolites (including organic acids, polyols, amino acids, and sugars) were identified in this study. Moreover, we proposed optimal olive harvesting strategy models based on different production purposes. In addition, we used the combined Pacbio Iso-seq and Illumina RNA-seq gene expression data to identify genes related to the biosynthetic pathways of hydroxytyrosol and oleuropein. These data lay the foundation for future investigations of olive fruit metabolism and gene expression patterns, and provide a method to obtain olive harvesting strategies for different production purposes.


BMC Genomics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Inés González-Castellano ◽  
Chiara Manfrin ◽  
Alberto Pallavicini ◽  
Andrés Martínez-Lage

Abstract Background The common littoral shrimp Palaemon serratus is an economically important decapod resource in some European communities. Aquaculture practices prevent the genetic deterioration of wild stocks caused by overfishing and at the same time enhance the production. The biotechnological manipulation of sex-related genes has the proved potential to improve the aquaculture production but the scarcity of genomic data about P. serratus hinders these applications. RNA-Seq analysis has been performed on ovary and testis samples to generate a reference gonadal transcriptome. Differential expression analyses were conducted between three ovary and three testis samples sequenced by Illumina HiSeq 4000 PE100 to reveal sex-related genes with sex-biased or sex-specific expression patterns. Results A total of 224.5 and 281.1 million paired-end reads were produced from ovary and testis samples, respectively. De novo assembly of ovary and testis trimmed reads yielded a transcriptome with 39,186 transcripts. The 29.57% of the transcriptome retrieved at least one annotation and 11,087 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were detected between ovary and testis replicates. Six thousand two hundred seven genes were up-regulated in ovaries meanwhile 4880 genes were up-regulated in testes. Candidate genes to be involved in sexual development and gonadal development processes were retrieved from the transcriptome. These sex-related genes were discussed taking into account whether they were up-regulated in ovary, up-regulated in testis or not differentially expressed between gonads and in the framework of previous findings in other crustacean species. Conclusions This is the first transcriptome analysis of P. serratus gonads using RNA-Seq technology. Interesting findings about sex-related genes from an evolutionary perspective (such as Dmrt1) and for putative future aquaculture applications (Iag or vitellogenesis genes) are reported here. We provide a valuable dataset that will facilitate further research into the reproductive biology of this shrimp.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasiliki Koutsouveli ◽  
David Balgoma ◽  
Antonia Checa ◽  
Mikael Hedeland ◽  
Ana Riesgo ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Sponges contain an astounding diversity of lipids which serve in several biological functions, including yolk formation in their oocytes and the embryos. On animal reproduction, lipids constitute one of the main energy storage forms for the adult and the offspring. The study of lipid metabolism during reproduction can provide information on food-web dynamics and energetic needs of the populations in their habitats, however, there are no studies focusing on the lipid metabolism of sponges during seasonal reproduction. The deep-sea sponge Phakellia ventilabrum (Demospongiae, Bubarida) is a key species of North-Atlantic sponge grounds, but its reproductive biology is not known. In this study, we used histological sections, lipidome profiling (UHPLC-MS), and transcriptomic analysis (RNA-seq) with goal to i. assess the reproductive strategy and seasonality of this species, ii. examine the relative changes in the lipidome signal, and the gene expression patterns (RNA-seq) of enzymes participating in lipid metabolism in female specimens during gametogenesis.Results P. ventilabrum is an oviparous and most certainly gonochoristic species, reproducing in May and September in the different studied areas. Half of specimens were reproducing, generating two to five oocytes per mm2. Oocytes accumulated both protein and lipid droplets. As oogenesis progressed, the signal of most of the unsaturated and monounsaturated triacylglycerides increased, as well as of few other phospholipids. Most of the other lipids and especially those with > 3 unsaturations showed a decrease in signal during the oocyte maturation. In parallel, we detected upregulated genes in female tissues related to triacylglyceride biosynthesis and others related to fatty acid beta-oxidation.Conclusions Triacylglycerides are probably the main type of lipid forming the yolk since this lipid category has the most marked changes, while some other phospholipids may also have a role in oogenesis. In parallel, other lipid categories were oxidized, leading to fatty acid beta-oxidation to cover the energy requirements of female individuals during oogenesis. Variations in the signal of most lipids between the different locations and months suggest that sponges, apart from their own mechanisms of lipid biosynthesis, exploit the food availability in their surroundings to cover the energetic demands in their physiological processes.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avi Z. Rosenberg ◽  
Carrie Wright ◽  
Karen Fox-Talbot ◽  
Anandita Rajpurohit ◽  
Courtney Williams ◽  
...  

AbstractAccurate, RNA-seq based, microRNA (miRNA) expression estimates from primary cells have recently been described. However, this in vitro data is mainly obtained from cell culture, which is known to alter cell maturity/differentiation status, significantly changing miRNA levels. What is needed is a robust method to obtain in vivo miRNA expression values directly from cells. We introduce expression microdissection miRNA small RNA sequencing (xMD-miRNA-seq), a method to isolate cells directly from formalin fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissues. xMD-miRNA-seq is a low-cost, high-throughput, immunohistochemistry-based method to capture any cell type of interest. As a proof-of-concept, we isolated colon epithelial cells from two specimens and performed low-input small RNA-seq. We generated up to 600,000 miRNA reads from the samples. Isolated epithelial cells, had abundant epithelial-enriched miRNA expression (miR-192; miR-194; miR-200b; miR-200c; miR-215; miR-375) and overall similar miRNA expression patterns to other epithelial cell populations (colonic enteroids and flow-isolated colon epithelium). xMD-derived epithelial cells were generally not contaminated by other adjacent cells of the colon as noted by t-SNE analysis. xMD-miRNA-seq allows for simple, economical, and efficient identification of cell-specific miRNA expression estimates. Further development will enhance rapid identification of cell-specific miRNA expression estimates in health and disease for nearly any cell type using archival FFPE material.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jieun Jeong ◽  
Manolis Kellis

We assembled a panel of 28 tissue pairs of human and mouse with RNA-Seq data on gene expression. We focused on genes with no 1-to-1 homology, because they pose special challenges. In this way, we identified expression patterns that identify and explain differences between the two species and suggest target genes for therapeutic applications. Here we mention three examples. One pattern is observed by defining the aggregate expression of immunoglobulin genes (which have no homology) as a measure of different levels of an immune response. In Lung, we used this statistic to find genes that have significantly higher expression in low/moderate response, and thus they may be therapy targets: increasing their expression or mimicking their function with medications may help in recovery from inflammation in the lungs. Some of the observed associations are common to human and mouse; other associations involve genes involved in cell-to-cell signaling or in regeneration but were not known to be important in Lung. Second pattern is that in the Small Intestine, mouse expresses much less antimicrobial defensins, while it has much higher expression of enzymes that are found to improve adaptive immune response. Such enzymes may be tested if they improve probiotic supplements that help in gut inflammation and other diseases. Another pattern involves a many-to-many homology group of defensins that did not have a described function. In human tissues, expression of its genes was found only in a study of a disease of hair covered skin, but several of its genes are highly expressed in two tissues of our panel: mouse Skin and to a lesser degree mouse Vagina. This suggests that those genes or their homologs in other species may provide non-antibiotic medications for hair covered skin and other tissues with microbiome that includes fungi.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document