Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Yuan, Wei
• Beitel, Fiona
• Srikant, Thanvi
• Bezrukov, Ilja
• Schäfer, Sabine
• Kraft, Robin
• Weigel, Detlef

Titel

Pervasive under-dominance in gene expression underlying emergent growth trajectories in Arabidopsis thaliana hybrids

Ist Teil von

• Genome Biology, 2023-09, Vol.24 (1), p.1-200, Article 200

Ort / Verlag

London: BioMed Central

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Abstract Background Complex traits, such as growth and fitness, are typically controlled by a very large number of variants, which can interact in both additive and non-additive fashion. In an attempt to gauge the relative importance of both types of genetic interactions, we turn to hybrids, which provide a facile means for creating many novel allele combinations. Results We focus on the interaction between alleles of the same locus, i.e., dominance, and perform a transcriptomic study involving 141 random crosses between different accessions of the plant model species Arabidopsis thaliana . Additivity is rare, consistently observed for only about 300 genes enriched for roles in stress response and cell death. Regulatory rare-allele burden affects the expression level of these genes but does not correlate with F 1 rosette size. Non-additive, dominant gene expression in F 1 hybrids is much more common, with the vast majority of genes (over 90%) being expressed below the parental average. Unlike in the additive genes, regulatory rare-allele burden in the dominant gene set is strongly correlated with F 1 rosette size, even though it only mildly covaries with the expression level of these genes. Conclusions Our study underscores under-dominance as the predominant gene action associated with emergence of rosette growth trajectories in the A. thaliana hybrid model. Our work lays the foundation for understanding molecular mechanisms and evolutionary forces that lead to dominance complementation of rare regulatory alleles.