Identification of target genes of the NMD factor SMG7b

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is a conserved mRNA quality control mechanism that identifies and destroys aberrant mRNAs that contain premature termination codons (PTCs). The NMD core comprises seven proteins, from SMG1 to SMG7. Arabidopsis has orthologues of most of these proteins. Studies on yeast, Drosophila, Humans and Arabidopsis reveal that NMD not only functions to target PTC-containing mRNAs but also acts as a global regulator of gene expression. It has also been reported that the NMD pathway branches with some target genes being dependent on specific NMD factors. In order to determine the extent to which different NMD factors co-regulate or independently regulate Arabidopsis genes, transcriptome analysis of smg7b-1 mutants will be carried out and added to existent data of upf1, upf3 and smg5 NMD mutants for comparison. RNA will be extracted from 17 day-old mutant and wild type seedlings grown at 22-24 C under constant light. 4 samples were used in this experiment