Analysis of the nitrate-responsive transcriptome of the Arabidopsis root

Nitrate and other nitrogen metabolites can act as signals that regulate global gene expression in plants. Adaptive changes in plant morphology and physiology triggered by changes in nitrate availability are partly explained by these changes in gene expression. Despite several genome-wide efforts to identify nitrate-regulated genes, no comprehensive study of the Arabidopsis root transcriptome under contrasting nitrate conditions has been carried out. In this work, we employed the Illumina high throughput sequencing technology to perform an integrated analysis of the poly-A+ enriched and the small RNA fractions of the Arabidopsis thaliana root transcriptome in response to nitrate treatments. Our sequencing strategy identified new nitrate-regulated genes including 40 genes not represented in the ATH1 Affymetrix GeneChip, a novel nitrate-responsive antisense transcript and a new nitrate responsive miRNA/TARGET module consisting of a novel microRNA, miR5640 and its target, AtPPC3. This nitrate-responsive miRNA/target module might be involved in controlling carbon flux to assimilate nitrate into amino acids, suggesting that microRNAs can have both developmental and metabolic functions in the nitrate response of Arabidopsis roots. Arabidopsis thaliana wild-type Col-0 plants were grown in hydroponic nitrate-free medium with 0.5 mM ammonium succinate as the only N-source for two weeks and were treated with 5 mM KNO3, or 5 mM KCl as control, for 2 hours. Total RNA from two independent sets of plants (biological replicates) was extracted from roots, and poly-A+ enriched and sRNA fractions were used to construct libraries for Illumina sequencing.