Defining the developmental program leading to meiosis in maize

We isolated pre-meiotic and early meiotic cells from 24 maize anthers, covering a week of development from the day after archesporial (AR) cell specification to the early zygotene stage of meiotic prophase I. Starting material was staged by anther length, and anther stages were densely sampled from throughout this period. High quality reads were obtained from 144 cells. Single-cell RNA-seq of premeiotic and early meiotic cells from maize anthers. Libraries were constructed with a modified version of CelSeq2.