Senescence time course of unfertilized Arabidopsis thaliana ovules

Flowers have a species-specific fertile period during which pollination and fertilization have to occur to initiate seed and fruit development. Within the flower, the functional life span of the ovule containing the female gametophyte is decisive for fertilization and the initiation of seed development. Here we performed an RNA-sequencing based transcriptome analysis of senescing unfertilized ovules during in a time series. We isolated ovules from Arabidopsis thaliana flowers emasculated at stage 12c at three different time points: 2 days after emasculation (DAE), 3 DAE, and 4 DAE. These time points correspond to intact mature ovules (2DAE), early ovule senescence (3 DAE), and late ovule senescence (4 DAE). We extracted total RNA from the ovules in 3 independent biological replicates, thus generating 9 RNA samples in total, for RNA-sequencing by Illumina HiSeq.