Expression analysis in HDA6 mutants

In addition to the canonical RNAi pathways that targets mRNAs in the cytoplasm, several RNA-dependent pathways operate in the nucleus to induce sequence-specific epigenetic modifications. One specialized type of RNAi-mediated pathway is RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM). During RdDM, nuclear DNA with sequence identity to the trigger dsRNA is de novo methylated at almost all cytosine residues, providing a mark for the formation of transcriptionally silent heterochromatin. Genetic forward screens identified the RPD3-like histone deacetylase HDA6 as the enzyme responsible for the histone deacetylation step of RdDM and suggest that HDA6 might have acquired specific functions for RNA-directed transcriptional silencing processes [Aufsatz et al., 2002a; Aufsatz et al., 2002b]. Complete loss-of-function mutants for AtHDA6 (rts1-1; RNA-mediated transcriptional gene silencing) exhibit reactivation of RdDM-silenced promoters, despite the continuous presence of the silencing-inducing RNA signal. One of the found mutant alleles, rts1-5, has an amino acid substitution located at a conserved position within the HDAC domain (Naumann et al., manuscript in preparation). This mutant is characterized by strong reactivation of an RdDM-silenced target promoter, despite maintaining wild-type levels of cytosine methylation. An evaluation of the transcription pattern among the mutants with opposite methylation phenotype and wild-type plants should show which genes are differentially regulated between the mutants in comparison to wild-type plants. Keywords: Expression profiling by array 9 samples were used in this experiment