Diving into the circadian transcriptome, an RNA-Seq approach.

ANDRÉS ROMANOWSKI *; ESTEFANÍA MANCINI; SABRINA SANCHEZ; MATIAS RUGNONE; MARCELO YANOVSKY

Tunuyán

Simposio; XII Latinamerican Symposium of Chronobiology; 2013

LASC

Arabidopsis thaliana is a small flowering plant used as a model organism in plant biology and genetics research. It was the first plant to have its genome sequenced and was key to understanding the molecular biology of diverse plant traits, such as flowering and light sensing. Many circadian rhythms have been described in this organism (i.e.: leaf movement, hypocotyl elongation, etc.) and the molecular clockwork mechanism behind these rhythms is known. In recent years, advances in the field of RNA sequencing have revolutionized many fields of scientific research, including but not limited to cancer, metabolism, aging and molecular biology. RNA-Seq allows for global transcriptome profiling using deep sequencing technologies, providing far more precise measurement of levels of transcripts and their isoforms than other methods. In this work we have applied RNA-Seq to profile the global circadian transcriptome of Arabidopsis thaliana Col-0 and a lnk1; lnk2 double mutant in LD 12h : 12 h conditions (LD, light-dark, and constant temperature, 20ºC). With this approach we have been able to quantify expression levels of the whole genome and particularly of circadian and flowering associated genes, as well as studying their splicing patterns. Taken together, these results show that RNA-Seq is a very powerful tool to study circadian gene expression, including transcript isoform discrimination.