Arabidopsis meiocyte sequencing

By using the micro-capture system to isolate meiocytes from dissected anthers under microscope, we have interrogated the transcriptome landscape of Arabidopsis male meiocytes, and defined about 1,000 meiosis-preferential genes that are expressed in meiocytes. However, in contrast to the well-studied epigenetic landscapes such as DNA methylation, histone modification, chromatin structure, and noncoding RNA in somatic cells, the knowledge of the epigenetic landscape in meiocytes is still limited. In this project, we deep sequenced the total small RNAs ranging from 15-50nt from wild type Col-0 and the recombination deficient mutant spo11-1. We then explored the characteristics and genome distribution of meiotic siRNA. And studied the role of meiotic siRNAs in meiotic recombination.