Advances in transcriptomics have provided an exceptional opportunity to study functional implications of the genetic variability. Technologies such as RNA-Seq have emerged as state-of-the-art ...techniques for transcriptome analysis that take advantage of high-throughput next-generation sequencing. However, similar to their predecessors, these approaches continue to impose major challenges on full-length transcript structure identification, primarily due to inherent limitations of read length. With the development of single-molecule sequencing (SMS) from PacBio, a growing number of studies on the transcriptome of different organisms have been reported. SMS has emerged as advantageous for comprehensive genome annotation including identification of novel genes/isoforms, long non-coding RNAs and fusion transcripts. This approach can be used across a broad spectrum of species to better interpret the coding information of the genome, and facilitate the biological function study. We provide an overview of SMS platform and its diverse applications in various biological studies, and our perspective on the challenges associated with the transcriptome studies.
The iPlant Collaborative provides life science research communities access to comprehensive, scalable, and cohesive computational infrastructure for data management; identity management; ...collaboration tools; and cloud, high-performance, high-throughput computing. iPlant provides training, learning material, and best practice resources to help all researchers make the best use of their data, expand their computational skill set, and effectively manage their data and computation when working as distributed teams. iPlant's platform permits researchers to easily deposit and share their data and deploy new computational tools and analysis workflows, allowing the broader community to easily use and reuse those data and computational analyses.
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Sequencing technology and assembly algorithms have matured to the point that high-quality de novo assembly is possible for large, repetitive genomes. Current assemblies traverse transposable elements ...(TEs) and provide an opportunity for comprehensive annotation of TEs. Numerous methods exist for annotation of each class of TEs, but their relative performances have not been systematically compared. Moreover, a comprehensive pipeline is needed to produce a non-redundant library of TEs for species lacking this resource to generate whole-genome TE annotations.
We benchmark existing programs based on a carefully curated library of rice TEs. We evaluate the performance of methods annotating long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons, terminal inverted repeat (TIR) transposons, short TIR transposons known as miniature inverted transposable elements (MITEs), and Helitrons. Performance metrics include sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, precision, FDR, and F
. Using the most robust programs, we create a comprehensive pipeline called Extensive de-novo TE Annotator (EDTA) that produces a filtered non-redundant TE library for annotation of structurally intact and fragmented elements. EDTA also deconvolutes nested TE insertions frequently found in highly repetitive genomic regions. Using other model species with curated TE libraries (maize and Drosophila), EDTA is shown to be robust across both plant and animal species.
The benchmarking results and pipeline developed here will greatly facilitate TE annotation in eukaryotic genomes. These annotations will promote a much more in-depth understanding of the diversity and evolution of TEs at both intra- and inter-species levels. EDTA is open-source and freely available: https://github.com/oushujun/EDTA.
Zea mays is an important genetic model for elucidating transcriptional networks. Uncertainties about the complete structure of mRNA transcripts limit the progress of research in this system. Here, ...using single-molecule sequencing technology, we produce 111,151 transcripts from 6 tissues capturing ∼70% of the genes annotated in maize RefGen_v3 genome. A large proportion of transcripts (57%) represent novel, sometimes tissue-specific, isoforms of known genes and 3% correspond to novel gene loci. In other cases, the identified transcripts have improved existing gene models. Averaging across all six tissues, 90% of the splice junctions are supported by short reads from matched tissues. In addition, we identified a large number of novel long non-coding RNAs and fusion transcripts and found that DNA methylation plays an important role in generating various isoforms. Our results show that characterization of the maize B73 transcriptome is far from complete, and that maize gene expression is more complex than previously thought.
First-Generation Haplotype Map of Maize Gore, Michael A; Chia, Jer-Ming; Elshire, Robert J ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
11/2009, Volume:
326, Issue:
5956
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Maize is an important crop species of high genetic diversity. We identified and genotyped several million sequence polymorphisms among 27 diverse maize inbred lines and discovered that the genome was ...characterized by highly divergent haplotypes and showed 10- to 30-fold variation in recombination rates. Most chromosomes have pericentromeric regions with highly suppressed recombination that appear to have influenced the effectiveness of selection during maize inbred development and may be a major component of heterosis. We found hundreds of selective sweeps and highly differentiated regions that probably contain loci that are key to geographic adaptation. This survey of genetic diversity provides a foundation for uniting breeding efforts across the world and for dissecting complex traits through genome-wide association studies.
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Nitrogen is an essential macronutrient for plant growth and basic metabolic processes. The application of nitrogen-containing fertilizer increases yield, which has been a substantial factor in the ...green revolution
. Ecologically, however, excessive application of fertilizer has disastrous effects such as eutrophication
. A better understanding of how plants regulate nitrogen metabolism is critical to increase plant yield and reduce fertilizer overuse. Here we present a transcriptional regulatory network and twenty-one transcription factors that regulate the architecture of root and shoot systems in response to changes in nitrogen availability. Genetic perturbation of a subset of these transcription factors revealed coordinate transcriptional regulation of enzymes involved in nitrogen metabolism. Transcriptional regulators in the network are transcriptionally modified by feedback via genetic perturbation of nitrogen metabolism. The network, genes and gene-regulatory modules identified here will prove critical to increasing agricultural productivity.
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The challenges of accurate gene prediction and enumeration are further aggravated in large genomes that contain highly repetitive transposable elements (TEs). Yet TEs play a substantial role in ...genome evolution and are themselves an important subject of study. Repeat annotation, based on counting occurrences of k-mers, has been previously used to distinguish TEs from low-copy genic regions; but currently available software solutions are impractical due to high memory requirements or specialization for specific user-tasks.
Here we introduce the Tallymer software, a flexible and memory-efficient collection of programs for k-mer counting and indexing of large sequence sets. Unlike previous methods, Tallymer is based on enhanced suffix arrays. This gives a much larger flexibility concerning the choice of the k-mer size. Tallymer can process large data sizes of several billion bases. We used it in a variety of applications to study the genomes of maize and other plant species. In particular, Tallymer was used to index a set of whole genome shotgun sequences from maize (B73) (total size 109 bp.). We analyzed k-mer frequencies for a wide range of k. At this low genome coverage ( approximately 0.45x) highly repetitive 20-mers constituted 44% of the genome but represented only 1% of all possible k-mers. Similar low-complexity was seen in the repeat fractions of sorghum and rice. When applying our method to other maize data sets, High-C0t derived sequences showed the greatest enrichment for low-copy sequences. Among annotated TEs, the most highly repetitive were of the Ty3/gypsy class of retrotransposons, followed by the Ty1/copia class, and DNA transposons. Among expressed sequence tags (EST), a notable fraction contained high-copy k-mers, suggesting that transposons are still active in maize. Retrotransposons in Mo17 and McC cultivars were readily detected using the B73 20-mer frequency index, indicating their conservation despite extensive rearrangement across cultivars. Among one hundred annotated bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs), k-mer frequency could be used to detect transposon-encoded genes with 92% sensitivity, compared to 96% using alignment-based repeat masking, while both methods showed 92% specificity.
The Tallymer software was effective in a variety of applications to aid genome annotation in maize, despite limitations imposed by the relatively low coverage of sequence available. For more information on the software, see http://www.zbh.uni-hamburg.de/Tallymer.
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The genetic basis of general plant vigor is of major interest to food producers, yet the trait is recalcitrant to genetic mapping because of the number of loci involved, their small effects, and ...linkage. Observations of heterosis in many crops suggests that recessive, malfunctioning versions of genes are a major cause of poor performance, yet we have little information on the mutational spectrum underlying these disruptions. To address this question, we generated a long-read assembly of a tropical japonica rice (Oryza sativa) variety, Carolina Gold, which allowed us to identify structural mutations (>50 bp) and orient them with respect to their ancestral state using the outgroup, Oryza glaberrima. Supporting prior work, we find substantial genome expansion in the sativa branch. While transposable elements (TEs) account for the largest share of size variation, the majority of events are not directly TE-mediated. Tandem duplications are the most common source of insertions and are highly enriched among 50-200bp mutations. To explore the relative impact of various mutational classes on crop fitness, we then track these structural events over the last century of US rice improvement using 101 resequenced varieties. Within this material, a pattern of temporary hybridization between medium and long-grain varieties was followed by recent divergence. During this long-term selection, structural mutations that impact gene exons have been removed at a greater rate than intronic indels and single-nucleotide mutations. These results support the use of ab initio estimates of mutational burden, based on structural data, as an orthogonal predictor in genomic selection.
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