Genome-wide survey of cold stress regulated alternative splicing in Arabidopsis thaliana

Alternative splicing plays a major role in expanding the potential informational content of eukaryotic genomes. It is an important post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism that can increase protein diversity and affect mRNA stability. Cold stress, which adversely affects plants growth and development, regulates the transcription and splicing of plants splicing factors. This affects the pre-mRNA processing of many genes. To identify cold regulated alternative splicing we applied Affymetrix Arabidopsis tiling arrays to survey the transcriptome under cold treatment conditions. Two-week old Arabidopsis seedlings grown on agar were subjected to 24 hours of cold (4°C) treatment under long day conditions. Control and cold-treated plants were harvested at the same time to ensure that observed differences would not be due to circadian clock effects on transcripts. Total RNA from four biological repeats were used for microarray hybridization.