Abstract
Plant imprinted genes show parent-of-origin expression in seed endosperm, but little is known about the nature of parental imprints in gametes before fertilization. We show here that single differentially methylated regions (DMRs) correlate with allele-specific expression of two maternally expressed genes in the seed and that one DMR is differentially methylated between gametes. Thus, plants seem to have developed similar strategies as mammals to epigenetically mark imprinted genes.
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Acknowledgements
We thank B. Khbaya, W. Paul and the transformation team at Biogemma for generating the maize transgenic material and J. Walter for advice on single-cell bisulfite methylation analysis. This work was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (INTEP Initiative) and EU Framework V (MAZE) Project QLK3-2000-00196.
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Supplementary information
Supplementary Fig. 1
Endosperm DNA gel blot analysis of differentially methylated regions present in the 5′ sequences of fie1 and fie2. (PDF 74 kb)
Supplementary Fig. 2
Full bisulfite methylation data set at the fie2 DMR for paternal fie2 and fie2–GFP alleles in the endosperm. (PDF 57 kb)
Supplementary Table 1
Bisulfite primer sequences, PCR product size and polymorphism information. (PDF 56 kb)
Supplementary Table 2
Percentage of methylation at CpG, CpNpG and CpNpN sites in genomic regions analyzed by bisulfite sequencing. (PDF 65 kb)
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Gutiérrez-Marcos, J., Costa, L., Prà, M. et al. Epigenetic asymmetry of imprinted genes in plant gametes. Nat Genet 38, 876–878 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1828
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1828
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