Expression profile analysis of macrosclereid cell development in Medicago truncatula

Macrosclereid cells, which form a layer in the seed coat of Medicago truncatula, accumulate large amounts of phytochemicals during their development. To characterize these phytochemicals and provide a broad analysis of gene expression in developing M. truncatula macrosclereid cells, we produced microarrays that displayed approximately 4861 differentially expressed probe sets (absolute fold-change of ≥3.0; LogRatio p-value of ≤0.001) between at least two time points in macrosclereid cell development, inculding 6DPP, 10DPP, 13DPP, 16DPP, 20DPP, 27DPP. Randomly selected flowers were tagged (using small different colored tags with different colored strings) on the day after pollination. Whole pods were collected at various days post pollination (DPP; from 6 to 27 DPP).