Nelle Varoquaux*, Benjamin Cole*, Cheng Gao*, Grady Pierroz, Christopher R. Baker, Dhruv Patel, Mary Madera, Tim Jeffers, Joy Hollingsworth, Julie Sievert, Yuko Yoshinaga, Judith A. Owiti, Vasanth R. Singan, Stephanie DeGraaf, Ling Xu, Matthew J. Blow, Maria J. Harrison, Axel Visel, Christer Jansson, Krishna K. Niyogi, Robert Hutmacher, Devin Coleman-Derr, Ronan O'Malley, John W. Taylor, Jeffery Dahlberg, John P. Vogel*, Peggy G. Lemaux*, Elizabeth Purdom*
Drought is the most important environmental stress limiting crop yields. The C4 cereal, Sorghum bicolor, is an important food, forage, and emerging bioenergy crop that is notably drought-tolerant. We conducted a large-scale field experiment, imposing pre- and post-flowering drought stress on two genotypes of S. bicolor across a tightly-resolved time series, resulting in a data set of over 350 transcriptomes. We observed a fast and global transcriptomic response in leaf and root tissues with clear temporal patterns, including modulation of well-known drought pathways. We identified genotypic differences in core photosynthesis and reactive oxygen species scavenging pathways, highlighting possible mechanisms of drought tolerance and of the stay-green phenotype. Finally, we discovered a large scale depletion in the expression of genes critical to arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis, with a corresponding drop in AM fungal mass in the plants' rhizosphere.
| Sample type | GEO entry | Processed RNA-seq data | Differential expression and clustering analysis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leaf | GSE128441 | Count Normalized Metadata | DE and Clustering Results Log fold change estimates |
| Root | GSE128441 | Count Normalized Metadata | DE and Clustering Results Log fold change estimates |