Poster: Late and Moved Abstracts

Abs # 964: Transcript profiling in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Presenter:	Robinson, Stephen J., Robinsons@agr.gc.ca
Authors	Robinson, Stephen J. (A)   Cram, Dustin J. (A)   Lewis, Christopher  (A)   Parkin, Isobel A. P. (A)
Affiliations:	(A): Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

Many plants acquire an increase in freezing tolerance through cold acclimation, an exposure to low non-freezing temperatures. Complex physiological changes are associated with the cold acclimation process, many of which are preceded by alterations in gene expression. The advent of high throughput genomic technologies combined with the completion of the Arabidopsis genome sequence allows changes in gene expression to be monitored on a global scale. We have used the Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) to produce a quantitative analysis of gene expression, to identify differences between Arabidopsis plants growing under normal (20ºC) and low temperature conditions (3ºC) for varying amounts of time. A total of 184,580 tags were sequenced from two SAGE libraries developed from plants exposed to normal temperature, and low temperature for 30 minutes. After the exclusion of unreliable tags, a total of 144,638 tags were analyzed, 29,633 of these tags were unique. SAGE analysis has identified a number of novel transcripts which are differentially expressed in response to low temperature, including the presence of antisense mRNAs.