Plant & Animal Genomes XIV Conference

January 14-18, 2006
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Transcript Profiling Of The Sugarcane Stem Using The Genechip® Sugar Cane Genome Array

Rosanne E. Casu^1,2 , Janine M. Jarmey^1,2 , Graham D. Bonnett^1,2 , John M. Manners^1,2

¹  CSIRO Plant Industry, Queensland Bioscience Precinct, 306 Carmody Rd., St Lucia, Queensland, 4067, Australia

²  Cooperative Research Centre for Sugar Industry Innovation through Biotechnology, Level 5, John Hines Building, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, 4072, Australia

Sugarcane accumulates high concentrations of sucrose in the mature stem. This is a result of numerous physiological processes in maturing stem tissue both directly and indirectly allowing this to occur. For example, in addition to sucrose accumulation, a considerable portion of carbohydrate metabolism is also devoted to cell wall synthesis and fibre production. Previously, custom cDNA-microarrays were the only high-throughput platform available to use for expression profiling in sugarcane. This required access to existing cDNA collections from stem tissues and did not assay the wealth of EST sequence information available for sugarcane. In this study, we have assessed the suitability of the newly released GeneChip® Sugar Cane Genome Array produced by Affymetrix to robustly identify differentially expressed transcripts correlated with stem development. Using these Affymetrix GeneChips®, we have profiled transcripts derived from four biological replicates each of young stem (meristem and internodes 1-3), maturing stem (internode 8) and mature stem (internode 20) from Q117 plants grown in the field and harvested 10 months after planting. Several new insights into the transcript activity of the mature stem of sugarcane will be reported.