Meeting Abstract

S9-1.5  Saturday, Jan. 7  Evolutionary inferences from transcriptional analysis of wild and domesticated tomato SINHA, N R; Univ. of California, Davis nrsinha@ucdavis.edu

The domestication of crop species from wild relatives altered human history, while human intervention simultaneously modified the form, physiology, and life history of the domesticated plant species. The process of domestication thus provides us with a outstanding opportunity to understand the process of response to selection. We used genome-wide deep-coverage short-read sequencing to analyze the transcriptomes of one accession of domesticated tomato and three wild relatives for changes in gene expression, coding sequences, and gene regulation. Sampling from seven different organ and tissue types from plants grown in two environments allowed us to capture of the best representation of expressed genes in the tomato complex. We compared our identified transcripts to the recently completed tomato genome sequence and a partially complete sequence of Solanum pennellii, a green-fruited wild relative of tomato, to identify sequence polymorphisms and make differential gene expression calls. In addition, we sequenced miRNA loci, and also placed on the genome repeated regions with a high density of siRNA reads. Our analysis of the transcripts identifies those genes that show the largest expression differences between domesticated tomato and wild species, and in addition allows us to preliminarily identify genes and gene categories that show the strongest signatures of selection.