Natural epigenetic polymorphisms lead to intraspecific variation in Arabidopsis gene imprinting
- Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, United States
Abstract
Imprinted gene expression occurs during seed development in plants and is associated with differential DNA methylation of parental alleles, particularly at proximal transposable elements (TEs). Imprinting variability could contribute to observed parent-of-origin effects on seed development. We investigated intraspecific variation in imprinting, coupled with analysis of DNA methylation and small RNAs, among three Arabidopsis strains with diverse seed phenotypes. The majority of imprinted genes were parentally biased in the same manner among all strains. However, we identified several examples of allele-specific imprinting correlated with intraspecific epigenetic variation at a TE. We successfully predicted imprinting in additional strains based on methylation variability. We conclude that there is standing variation in imprinting even in recently diverged genotypes due to intraspecific epiallelic variation. Our data demonstrate that epiallelic variation and genomic imprinting intersect to produce novel gene expression patterns in seeds.
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© 2014, Pignatta et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Natural epigenetic polymorphisms lead to intraspecific variation in Arabidopsis gene imprinting
eLife 3:e03198.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.03198
Further reading
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