Heritable temporal gene expression patterns correlate with metabolomic seed content in developing hexaploid oat seed

• DOI: 10.1111/pbi.13286
• Publication Date: 2019-11-02T05:40:26Z
• Authors: Haixiao Hu; Juan J. Gutierrez...; Xinfang Liu; Trevor H. Yeats; David F. Garvin; Owen A. Hoekenga; Mark E. Sorrells; Michael A. Gore; Jean‐Luc Jannink
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 2. Zero hunger; 0303 health sciences; 03 medical and health sciences; Avena; Gene Expression Regulation, Plant; Gene Expression Profiling; Seeds; Metabolomics; Transcriptome; Research Articles

Oat ranks sixth in world cereal production and has a higher content of health-promoting compounds compared with other cereals. However, there is neither robust oat reference genome nor transcriptome. Using deeply sequenced full-length mRNA libraries cultivar Ogle-C, de novo high-quality comprehensive seed transcriptome was assembled. With this QuantSeq 3' sequencing, gene expression quantified during development from 22 diverse lines across six time points. Transcript showed correlations between adjacent Based on differentially expressed genes, we identified major temporal co-expression (TCoE) patterns revealed enriched ontology biological processes. Within each TCoE set, highly correlated transcripts, putatively commonly affected by genetic background, were clustered termed (GCoE) sets. Seventeen the sets had GCoE median heritabilities than 0.50, these heritability estimates much that estimated permutation analysis, no divergence observed cluster sizes non-permutation analyses. Linear regression 634 metabolites mature seeds PC1 score significantly lower p-values analysis. Temporal avenanthramides lipid biosynthetic genes concordant previous studies avenanthramide enzyme activity accumulation. This study expands our understanding physiological processes occur maturation provides plant breeders means to change composition through targeted manipulation key pathways.