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Correlation between parental transcriptome and field data for the characterization of heterosis in Zea mays L.

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Abstract

Heterosis is widely exploited in plant breeding, although its molecular basis is still not fully understood. For the characterization of this phenomenon and the development of transcriptome-based methods to predict hybrid performance (HP), we applied a microarray (46k) analysis of 21 European maize (Zea mays L.), 14 dent and 7 flint parental inbred lines. Expression profiles of the parental inbreds at the seedling stage were correlated with grain yield (GY) and grain dry matter content (GDMC) of 98 flint × dent factorial crosses at six locations. We observed highly significant correlations of the parental expression levels of certain differentially expressed genes with heterosis and HP for GY and also with HP for GDMC. This strong correlation provided first evidence toward a prediction potential of the genes and their expression levels. The identified gene set based on the parental transcriptome data revealed functional characteristics of HP and heterosis. Gene ontology (GO) analyses were performed to compare genes correlated with their expression pattern to HP for GY and GDMC, respectively. Between these gene groups, mostly different functional classes of genes were found to be enriched or underrepresented. The phenomenon of heterosis was characterized by the over- and underrepresentation of specific GO terms among heterosis-correlated genes.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the staff of the Plant Breeding Research Station at Eckartsweiler and Hohenheim for conducting the field experiments. We thank Sabina Miaskowska and Nadine Petersen for technical assistance. We are grateful to Heike Pospisil for helpful discussion. This project was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the priority program SPP 1149 “Heterosis in Plants” (Grant no. FR 1615/4-1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biocenter Klein Flottbek, University of Hamburg, 22609, Hamburg, Germany

    Alexander Thiemann & Stefan Scholten

  2. Institute for Plant Breeding, Seed Science and Population Genetics, Applied Genetics and Plant Breeding, University of Hohenheim, 70599, Stuttgart, Germany

    Junjie Fu, Tobias A. Schrag & Albrecht E. Melchinger

  3. Institute of Agronomy and Plant Breeding II, Justus-Liebig University, 35392, Giessen, Germany

    Matthias Frisch

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  1. Alexander Thiemann
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  6. Stefan Scholten
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Correspondence to Stefan Scholten.

Additional information

Communicated by M. Xu.

A. Thiemann and J. Fu contributed equally to this work.

Contribution to the special issue “Heterosis in Plants”.

The microarray data of this work were deposited in GEO at NCBI with the accession number GSE17754.

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Thiemann, A., Fu, J., Schrag, T.A. et al. Correlation between parental transcriptome and field data for the characterization of heterosis in Zea mays L.. Theor Appl Genet 120, 401–413 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00122-009-1189-9

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