Abstract
Little is known about how gene expression between orthologous genes of two species is quantitatively conserved among plant species. To address quantitative gene expression conservation during plant evolution, we compared quantitative gene expression data of two model plant species, Arabidopsis and tomato, which were obtained from DNA array analyses of leaf and root of two species. With FASTA search, we selected 4,274 putative orthologous gene pairs from the GeneChip sequence data for the species, and found that a strong conservation (< E-100) was seen in 19% of gene pairs, although some gene pairs exhibited low conservation. Quantitative expression levels in Gene Onthology categories such as "electron transport or energy pathways" were well conserved. To know a tendency of quantitative expression profile differences at the metabolic pathway level, we used plant metabolic pathway maps of KaPPA-View, and found that genes in "Sterol biosynthesis" were apt to express highly in tomato.
