Global gene expression profiles among five independent cytoplasmic male sterile lines.

We employed a microarray-based transcriptomic status comparison of rice cytoplasmic male sterile (CMS) lines in order to categorize the nuclear gene expressions upon cytoplasmic substitution. In anthers at the uninucleate and bicellular pollen stages, we found that 8,199 genes significantly changed their expression in at least one of the CMS lines. We categorized the genes into 100 clusters by k-means clustering, and common obvious expression patterns were observed in W11, LD and BT. RNA expression was measured for the anthers at uninucleate and bicellular pollen stages of five CMS lines (BT, CW, LD, W11, WA). T65 was used as the wild-type control. Microarray analysis was performed by three replicates using RNA extracted from independent plants.