Abstract
Heterosis is important for conventional plant breeding and is intensively used to increase the productivity of crop plants. Genetic processes shortly after fertilization might be of particular importance with respect to heterosis, because coordination of the diverse genomes establishes a basis for future performance of the sporophyte. Here we demonstrate a strong crossbreeding advantage of hybrid maize embryos as early as 6 days after fertilization in a modern maize hybrid and provide the first embryo specific analysis of associated gene expression pattern at this early stage of development. We identified differentially expressed genes between hybrid embryos and the parental genotypes by a combined approach of suppression subtractive hybridization and differential screening by microarray hybridizations. Association of heterosis in embryos with genes related to signal transduction and other regulatory processes was implied by the enrichment of these functional classes among the identified gene set. Quantitative RT-PCR analysis validated the expression pattern of 7 of 12 genes analysed and revealed predominantly additive, but also dominant and overdominant expression patterns in hybrid embryos. These patterns indicate that gene regulatory interactions among parental alleles act at this early developmental stage and the genes identified provide entry points for the exploration of gene regulatory networks associated with the specification of the phenomenon heterosis in the plant life cycle.
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Abbreviations
- Dap:
-
Days after pollination
- MPH:
-
Mid-parent heterosis
- BPH:
-
Best-parent heterosis
- qRT-PCR:
-
Quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. A. Melchinger (University of Hohenheim) and his coworkers for providing seeds of the inbred lines used in this study. We are especially grateful to Petra von Wiegen and Marlis Nissen for excellent technical help with embryo isolation. We thank Bärbel Hagemann for assisting the glass house work. This work was supported by the Eiselen-Foundation, Ulm and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) grant SCHO 746/2 within the framework program “heterosis in plants”.
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Accession numbers of the sequences mentioned in this article at GeneBank are EE297709 to EE297768.
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Meyer, S., Pospisil, H. & Scholten, S. Heterosis associated gene expression in maize embryos 6 days after fertilization exhibits additive, dominant and overdominant pattern. Plant Mol Biol 63, 381–391 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-006-9095-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-006-9095-x