Abstract
Several NAC and MYB-type transcriptional factors (TFs) are known to regulate the expression of secondary cell wall biosynthetic genes in Arabidopsis, but studies in rice are lacking. To comprehensively analyze cell wall formation in rice, we performed a co-expression analysis by using 164 microarray data for different rice tissues. In our co-expression network, orthologs of genes encoding Arabidopsis secondary wall-associated TFs and lignin biosynthetic genes distributed in a secondary wall-specific cluster, suggesting that our network is functionally relevant. To validate our network, we chose TFs predicted from our network to be associated with secondary wall formation and overexpressed or down-regulated the corresponding genes in rice. Analyses of transgenic rice revealed that many of them are actually involved in secondary wall formation. Apart from orthologs of Arabidopsis secondary wall-associated TFs, we identified TFs in which involvement in secondary wall formation were not reported previously.
This work was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan (Genomics for Agricultural Innovation, IPG-0003, RTR-0002).
