0 avis
Robustness of organ morphology is associated with modules of co-expressed genes related to plant cell wall
Archive ouverte
Edité par CCSD -
Reproducibility in organ size and shape is a fundamental trait of living organisms. Themechanisms underlying such robustness remain, however, to be elucidated. Taking the sepal ofArabidopsis as a model, we investigated whether variability of gene expression plays a role invariation of organ morphology. To address this question, we produced a dataset composed ofboth transcriptomic and morphological information obtained from 27 individual sepals fromwild-type plants. Although nearly identical in their genetic background, environment, anddevelopmental stage, these sepals exhibited appreciable variability in both morphology andtranscriptome. We identified modules of co-expressed genes in sepals, three of whichcorrelated significantly with morphology, revealing biologically relevant gene regulatorynetworks. Interestingly, cell-wall related genes were overrepresented in two of these threemodules. Additionally, we found that highly variable genes were unexpectedly enriched incell-wall related processes. We then analyzed sepal morphology from 16 cell-wall mutants andfound that the more a gene is expressed in wild-type, the more variable the morphology of thecorresponding mutant. Altogether, our work unravels the contribution of cell-wall related genesto the robustness of sepal morphology. More generally, we propose that canalizing traits duringdevelopment could rely on the modulation of highly expressed genes.
Consulter en ligne
Suggestions
Du même auteur
