Gene expression studies of barley low tillering mutants

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) uniculm2 (cul2) plants produce no tillers, while absent lower laterals (als), uniculm4 (cul4) and low number of tillers (lnt1) plants produce fewer tillers than wild-type barley plants. Gene expression was studied in comparison to wild-type cv. "Bowman" plants in embryo, crown, inflorescence and seedling tissue. Gene expression studies for uniculm2 (Okagaki et al., Funct Integr Genomics (2013) 13:33–41), absent lower laterals (Dabbert et al., Theor Appl Genet (2009) 118:1351–1360) and low number of tillers (Dabbert et al., Theor Appl Genet (2010) 121:705–715) plants have been previously published. Barley embryo, crown, inflorescence and seedling tissue was collected from all genotypes for RNA extraction and hybridization on Affymetrix Barley1 GeneChip microarrays. For each genotype and tissue 3 biological replicates from at least 10 plants each were sampled.