Abstract
Genomic imprinting is a phenomenon that occurs in flowering plants and mammals, whereby a gene is expressed in a parent-of-origin-specific manner. Although imprinting has now been examined genome-wide in a number of species using RNA-seq, the analyses used to assess imprinting vary between studies, making consistent comparisons between species difficult. Here we present a simple, easy-to-use bioinformatic pipeline for imprinting analyses suitable for any tissue, including plant endosperm. All relevant scripts can be downloaded. As an illustrative example, we reanalyze published data from A. thaliana and Z. mays endosperm using the pipeline and then demonstrate how to use the results to assess the conservation of imprinting between these species. We also introduce the Plant Imprinting Database, a repository for published imprinting datasets in plants that can be used to view, compare, and download data.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Andy Nutter-Upham and Scott McCallum for their tireless work in building the imprinting database and Daniela Pignatta for initial contributions to database design.
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Picard, C.L., Gehring, M. (2020). Identification and Comparison of Imprinted Genes Across Plant Species. In: Spillane, C., McKeown, P. (eds) Plant Epigenetics and Epigenomics . Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2093. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0179-2_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-0179-2_13
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