Plant & Animal Genomes XVII Conference

January 10-14, 2009
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Probing The Response Of The Musa Leaf Transcriptome To Drought Stress Using Heterologous Cross-Hybridization To The Affymetrix Rice Genechip Microarray

Mark, W. Davey¹ , Neil, S. Graham ² , Bartel Vanholme ³ , Rony Swennen ⁴ , Sean, T. May² , Johan Keulemans¹

¹  Laboratory for Fruit Breeding and Biotechnology, Department of Biosystems, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Box 2747, Willem De Croylaan 42, B-3001, Heverlee, Leuven, Belgium

²  Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre, School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington Campus, Loughborough, LE12 5RD, UK

³  Department of Molecular Biotechnology, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Coupure links 653, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium

⁴  Department of Biosystems, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 13 Box 2455, B - 3001 Leuven, Belgium

Here we evaluate the use of commercial high-density oligonucleotide GeneChip microarrays from heterologous plant species to profile the response of the banana (Musa spp) leaf transcriptome to drought stress using, a genomic DNA (gDNA)-based probe-mask selection strategy (Hammond et al., 2006). Following cross-hybridization of Musa gDNA to the Rice Genome Array, ~37,000 gene-specific probe-sets, corresponding to ~58% of the Musa genome were retained for transcriptomic analyses. Challenging the Rice Genome Array with RNA from control and drought stressed leaves of the Musa cultivar ‘Cachaco’ lead to the identification of 2,910 genes with a greater than 2-fold difference in expression levels. Gene ontology classifications indicated that the functional gene categories over-represented (relative to the genome) included many classes associated with plant biotic and abiotic stress responses. Additionally a range of regulatory genes (transcription factors) known to be involved in coordinating plant abiotic and drought stress responses were identified. Fifty-two of the drought-sensitive Musa transcripts were homologous to genes localized within QTLs for drought and cold tolerance in rice, including in 2 instances QTLs associated with a single underlying gene. Overall, our results demonstrate that despite the lack of nucleotide sequence data in Musa and only distant phylogenetic relations to rice, gDNA probe-based cross-hybridization studies to the Rice GeneChip is a highly promising strategy to study complex plant-environment interactions in this species.