Epigenomic Consequences Of Immortalized Plant Cell Suspension Culture

Main Category: Biology / Biochemistry
Article Date: 09 Dec 2008 - 2:00 PST

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Plant cells grown in culture exhibit genetic and epigenetic instability. Using a combination of chromatin immunoprecipitation and DNA methylation profiling on tiling microarrays, the authors mapped the location and abundance of histone and DNA modifications in a continuously proliferating, dedifferentiated cell suspension culture of Arabidopsis.

They found that euchromatin becomes hypermethylated in culture and that a small percentage of the hypermethylated genes become associated with heterochromatic marks. In contrast, the heterochromatin undergoes dramatic and very precise DNA hypomethylation with transcriptional activation of specific transposable elements (TEs) in culture. High throughput sequencing of small interfering RNA (siRNA) revealed that TEs activated in culture have increased levels of 21-nucleotide (nt) siRNA, sometimes at the expense of the 24-nt siRNA class.

In contrast, TEs that remain silent, which match the predominant 24-nt siRNA class, do not change significantly in their siRNA profiles. These results implicate RNA interference and chromatin modification in epigenetic restructuring of the genome following the activation of TEs in immortalized cell culture.

Citation

Epigenomic consequences of immortalized plant cell suspension culture.
Tanurdzic M, Vaughn MW, Jiang H, Lee TJ, Slotkin RK, et al. (2008)
PLoS Biol 6(12): e302. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060302 Click here to view article online

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