Transcriptional profiling of rice inflorescence meristem at the secondary panicle branch developmental stage of BILs from a cross between Koshihikari (japonica) and Habataki (indica)

Expression profilling of 79 BILs and their parents Koshihikari and Habataki were investigated by using the rice 44K-agilent microarray. RNAs were collected from the inflorescence meristem at the secondary panicle branch developmental stage. Fluorescent signals in the array were scanned and feature intensities extracted and measured by the Feature Extraction software (Agilent Technologies). The resulting data were normalized using the Variance-stabilizing normalization (VSN) algorithm (Huber et al., 2002). For determination of expression markers, the normalized data were statistically analyzed using rank product statistics as described by Breitling et al. (2004) with a P-value of 0.05. 79 BILs crossed between Koshihikari and Habataki