Arabidopsis Whole Genome Expression Profiling Under Abiotic Stress Conditions

Abstract

Plants respond and adapt to drought, cold and high-salinity stresses in order to survive.Many stress-regulated genes have been identified by the expression profiling studies using the DNA microarrays. However, we think that novel antisense RNAs, non-coding RNAs, small RNAs and alternative splicing mechanisms have a function in the plant responses to the stresses.
Recently, whole-genome tiling array has become a powerful tool for the analysis of the whole transcriptome, including analyses of sense-antisense transcripts, non-coding RNAs, small RNAs and alternative splicing. Now we are also applying Arabidopsis Affymetrix whole-genome tiling arrays (6.4 million 25-mer oligos) to study the whole transcriptome under drought, cold, and high-salinity stress conditions. The tiling array experiments for the 10-hr drought treatment indicated that the novel drought-responsive transcriptional units and antisense RNAs exist in the Arabidopsis genome and that the alternative splicing events occur in response to the drought stress.