Comprehensive analysis of Arabidopsis expression level polymorphisms with simple inheritance. Arabidopsis thaliana

Expression level polymorphisms (ELPs) often result in cis-acting expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTL), which are important QTL and association mapping tools and account significantly for phenotypic variability. Generally, it is assumed that such stably heritable ELP represent regulatory element polymorphisms in the respective genes. However, comprehensive genome-wide analyses linking expression level, regulatory sequence and gene structure variation are missing, preventing definite verification of this assumption. Here we analyzed heritability of ELP observed between Arabidopsis thaliana accessions Eil-0 and Lc-0 by comparing genotyped recombinant inbred lines (RIL) to their parents in microarray analyses. Keywords: expression level polymorphism, Arabidopsis thaliana accessions, recombinant inbred lines Overall design: In order to analyze expression level polymorphisms between the accessions Eil-0 and Lc-0, three independently grown seedling pools were analyzed by two color co-hybridization of the labeled cDNAs in dyeswap experiments, giving a total of six slides. For the analysis of gene expression in seedlings of 7 different RILs, each RIL sample was co-hybridized with each parent (Eil-0 and Lc-0) in a dyeswap, resulting in two slides per parent vs. RIL comparison. The total number of slides in this study was 34.