Global Quantitative Mapping of Enhancer Activity in Rice Genome by STARR-seq

Enhancers are important regulators of gene expression, but their identification is a challenge in plants. STARR-seq is a method measuring directly the enhancer activity of millions fragments in parallel, which had been successfully used to identify enhancers in Drosophila and human genomes. Here we present a global map of rice enhancers whose activities are quantitatively determined by STARR-seq.We also predicted intergenic enhancers based on DNase I hypersensitivity as described in a previously published work. Predicted enhancers overlap poorly with STARR-seq enhancers, only about 400 sites accounting for 3-4% of total enhancers identified by these two different methods. In summary, our results of STARR-seq reveal that enhancers in a plant genome differ from animal enhancers in several aspects and provide a regulatory element resource for further functional and mechanistic studies in different contexts PRJNA494898,SRP164632