Plant Comparative Transcriptomics Reveals Functional Mechanisms and Gene Regulatory Networks Involved in Anther Development and Male Sterility

Abstract

Gene transcription and transcriptional regulation are crucial biological processes in all cellular life. Through the next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology, transcriptome data from different tissues and developmental stages can be easily obtained, which provides us a powerful tool to reveal the transcriptional landscape of investigated tissue(s) at special developmental stage(s). Anther development is an important process not only for sexual plant reproduction but also for genic male sterility (GMS) used in agriculture production. Plant comparative transcriptomics has been widely used to uncover molecular mechanism of GMS. Here, we focused on researches of anther developmental process and plant GMS genes by using comparative transcriptomics method. In detail, the contents include the following: (1) we described the commonly used flowchart in comparative transcriptomics; (2) we summarized the comparative strategies used to analyze transcriptome data; (3) we presented a case study on a maize GMS gene, ZmMs33 ; (4) we described the methods and results previ-ously reported on gene co-expression and gene regulatory networks; (5) we presented the workflow of a case study on gene regulatory network reconstruction. The further development of comparative transcriptomics will provide us more powerful theoretical and application tools to investigate molecular mechanism underlying anther development and plant male sterility.