Haiyan Hu, Maojun Wang, Yuanhao Ding, Sitao Zhu, Guannan Zhao, Lili Tu*, Xianlong Zhang.2017.Plant Biotechnology Journal
Summary
Cotton fiber is an important natural fiber for the textile industry. The number of fiber initials determines the lint percentage, which is an important factor for cotton fiber yield. Although fiber development has been described by transcriptomic analysis, the mechanism by which the long non-coding RNA manipulate the initiation of lint and fuzz fibers remains unknown. In this study, three lines with different lint percentages were developed by crossing Xu142 with its fiberless mutant Xu142 fl. We collected the epidermal cells from the ovules with attached fibers at 0 and 5 days post-anthesis (DPA) from Xu142, the fiberless mutant Xu142 fl and the three lint percent diversified lines for deep transcriptome sequencing. A total of 2,641 novel genes, 35,802 long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and 2,262 circular RNAs (circRNAs) were identified, of which 645 lncRNAs were preferentially expressed in the fiberless mutant Xu142 fl and 651 lncRNAs were preferentially expressed in the fiber-attached lines. We demonstrated the functional roles of the three lncRNAs in fiber development via a virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) system. Our results showed that silencing XLOC_545639 and XLOC_039050 in Xu142 fl increased the number of fiber initials on the ovules, but silencing XLOC_079089 in Xu142 resulted in a short fiber phenotype. This study established the transcriptomic repertoires in cotton fiber initiation and provided evidence for the potential functions of lncRNAs in fiber development.
DOI: 10.1111/pbi.12844 IF=7.443