Advances in plant cell type-specific genome-wide studies of gene expression

Abstract

Cell is the functional unit of life. To study the complex interactions of systems of biological molecules, it is crucial to dissect these molecules at the cell level. In recent years, major progresses have been made by plant biologists to profile gene expression in specific cell types at the genome-wide level. Approaches based on the isolation of cells, polysomes or nuclei have been developed and successfully used for studying the cell types from distinct organs of several plant species. These cell-level data sets revealed previously unrecognized cellular properties, such as cell-specific gene expression modules and hormone response centers, and should serve as essential resources for functional genomic analyses. Newly developed technologies are more affordable to many laboratories and should help to provide new insights at the cellular resolution in the near future.

Keywords

transcriptome / cell type / plant

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Acknowledgments

We thank EM Meyerowitz for his continuous support. We apologize to those authors for not being able to directly cite their work due to space constraints. YJ is supported in part by the State Key Laboratory of Plant Genomics, and by the ‘100 Talents Project’ of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg