Abstract
Plants undergo rapid developmental transitions, as well as gradual developmental processes. Moreover, individual plants within a population will undergo the developmental transitions asynchronously, so it is difficult to assemble a time series to resolve the sequence of transcriptional changes that take place during these rapid transitions. Single-plant-omics has the potential to distinguish between transcriptional events that are associated with these binary and continuous processes. Furthermore, we can utilise single-plant-omics to exploit this developmental asynchrony to order individual plants by their developmental trajectory, revealing a detailed cascade of transcriptional events.
Here, we utilise single-plant-transcriptomics to resolve the transcriptional events that coincide with the onset of bolting. We performed RNA-seq on the leaves of individual plants from a large population of wild type Arabidopsis thaliana replicated at one time point during the vegetative-to-reproductive transition. Even though more than half of transcripts were differentially expressed between bolted and unbolted plants, we were able to find a subset of regulators that were more closely associated with gradual developmental traits like leaf size and biomass. Using a novel pseudotime inference algorithm, we determined that some senescence-associated processes, such as the reduction in ribosome biogenesis, are evident in the transcriptome before a bolt is visible.
These results show the potential of single-plant-omics to reveal the detailed sequence of events that occur during rapid developmental transitions.
Graphical Abstract: Physiological changes around bolting can be categorised into: ‘binary’ processes, which appear to have either occurred or not occurred at any given timepoint; or continuous processes, which can be observed quantitatively. For binary processes, expression of strongly correlated genes can appear to follow a ‘step’ change dynamic over time. However, when considered over a shorter timescale, the dynamics appear much smoother. For continuous processes, the shorter timescale should also capture smooth changes in gene expression.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
