lncRNAs play an important biological role in regulating the development of embryos and endosperm.

Long-chain non-coding RNA (lncRNAs) is one of the most important forms of genomic transcription level, but the biological significance of lncRNAs has been lacking for a long time.
a growing body of research has found that plant lncRNAs may be widely involved in regulating plant growth and development and response to environmental stress.
in the process of flowering plant seed development due to the occurrence of double fertilization phenomenon produced 2-fold embryo and 3-fold embryo.
may be due to the uneven parental genome dose of the endocestal milk, which has caused a wealth of epigenetic modificationsuch as low methylation and gene imprinting of the embryo genome, but it is not clear for a long time whether the expression samples in the embryo and embryo milk and whether they participate in the epigenetic regulation of seed development.
for most gemini plants (e.g. amoeba), during seed development, the embryo milk disappears with the development of the seed, thus making it difficult to investigate the apparent regulation of the embryo milk.
Liu Aizhong of Kunming Institute of Plant Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, used the twin leaf typical embryo-type seed plant castor as a research material to deeply analyze the expression law of lncRNAs, and revealed that lncRNAs and its adjacent protein coding genes showed strong co-expression, and they participated in different expression control networks, strongly implying that lNCRNAs play an important biological role in regulating the development of embryo and embryo.
at the same time, it was found that lncRNAs had low in-species sequence conservatism and high conservatism in the genome.
combined with the results of an analysis of pre-castor seed DNA methylation (Xu et al., 2016, Plant Physiology), the study found that lncRNAs, a specific expression of the embryo, were closely related to the low methylation of the embryo genome.
in interbreeding and embryo milk (ZB107 x ZB306), the vast majority of alleles can be expressed at the dose of their parents' genomes, showing that lncRNAs are insensitive to changes in the dose of the parent's genome (from 1m:1p to 2m:1p of the embryo).
but in the embryo, the expression of lncRNAs ethnostic sites significantly deviated from the phenomenon of parent-genome ratio 2m:1p, showing a clear parent-of-origin effect, i.e. genomic imprinting; As and previously identified imprinting genes (Xu et al., 2014, Nucleic Acids Research) are significantly clustered in the genome and exhibit collaborative transcription, further strongly suggesting that lncRNAs may have been involved in the occurrence of genomic imprinting.
the results of the study provide a new understanding of the effects of lncRNAs on the cumulative process of plant seed development and storage, the epigenetic regulation of lncRNAs, the imbalanced parent genome dose, and the expression effect of genomic imprinting on lncRNAs.
's main research was published in The Plant Journal with the title of Differential expression networks and inheritance patterns of long non-coding RNAs in castor bean seeds, with postdoctoral author Wei Xu as the first author of the paper.
the research was supported by the National Science and Technology Support Project (2015BAD15B02), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31661143002, 31771839 and 31701123) and the Yunnan Applied Basic Research Program (2016FB060).
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