Global co-function network of plant autophagy pathway

Autophagy is essential for plant response to a variety of developmental and environmental factors. However, unlike yeast and animals, only a few autophagy genes in plants are functionally conserved in the biological world. An important question is, how plants form autophagy related functions in evolution? Here, we developed and verified a workflow that identified 997 high-confidence autophagy related genes (ARG) in A.thaliana using multi-group data from nearly 10,000 samples and established a co-network of autophagy containing 3,419 new presumptive connections. Of note, through the genomic analysis of 76 representative plants from lower to higher levels, we found that ARGs were preferentially retained after polyploidization followed by terrestrialization, forming plant-specific autophagy-related functions. In addition, we provide the evolutionary gains and losses of ARGs function in monocotyledons and dicotyledons, and verified two novel genes ml2 and ml5 presumed to be involved in autophagy and leaf senescence. This work provides valuable resources for the study of plant autophagy and highlights that ARGs may selectively promote the success of plant autophagy through polyploidy in the process of evolution. Comparative gene expression profiling analysis of RNA-seq data for 7 day dark treated wt, ml2, and ml5 A. thaliana leaves .