Zea mays subsp. mays developing ear transcriptome, ra1 vs WT, ra2 Homozygous mutant

To understand the genetic mechanisms which control the production of pistillate (female) flowers, we collected a developmental sequence of maize (Zea mays subsp. mays) ears. Because the ear contains a gradient of heterogenous meristem types, we included mutant and wild-type ears from the classic ramosa1 and ramosa2 mutants, which extend the activity of normally ephemeral meristem types and impact the overall architecture of the ear. To accommodate this expanded number of samples, we adapted the low-cost, high throughput BRBseq multiplexing 3'UTR capture strategy (Alpern et al. 2019) such that samples from each genotype were sequenced in one library each.