Arabidopsis Whole-genome Transcriptome Analysis in Abiotic Stress Responses using a Tiling Array

Abstract

Plants respond and adapt to drought, cold and high-salinity stresses in order to survive. We have studied the role of RNA- or chromatin¹⁾-mediated regulation in the abiotic stress responses.
Tiling array experiments showed that many novel stress-responsive transcription units (TUs) exist in the Arabidopsis genome²⁾. Most of the novel TUs are non-coding RNAs mapped on the antisense strand of AGI code genes. High-correlation of the expression ratios (treated/untreated) was observed between AGI code genes and novel TUs on the antisense strand. We found that expression of sense TUs is necessary for stress- or ABA-inducible expression of the antisense TUs.
Recently, we also identified the target genes regulated by RdDM³⁾ and NMD⁴⁾ using a tiling array. Advantages and future perspectives of the tiling array will be discussed.
1) Kim et al. (2008) PCP; 2) Matsui et al. (2008)PCP; 3) Kurihara et al. (2008)BBRC; 4) Kurihara et al. (2008) PNAS (revised).