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Analysis of Multiple Years of RNA-Seq Data Using the 3D-RNA-Seq Application Reveals Seasonal Signatures of Differential Gene and Transcript-Level Expression, Alternative-Splicing, and Transcript...

Analysis of Multiple Years of RNA-Seq Data Using the 3D-RNA-Seq Application Reveals Seasonal Signatures of Differential Gene and Transcript-Level Expression, Alternative-Splicing, and Transcript...

How living organisms adapt to a changing world is a fundamental question of biology. Whereas natural selection makes organisms adapted to their environment by changing the genetic make-up of populations across generations, individual organisms adapt to changes in their immediate environment by altering how their genetic material is used and regulated. Plants make studying this process easy, as all their biology changes in accordance with the seasons. The mainstay of such research has involved measuring which genes are being turned on and off in different environmental contexts and relating their functions to survival, but genes can not only change their expression to meet environmental challenges but also diversify their products by a process called alternative splicing. Here we reanalyse the largest existing gene expression dataset for the well-studied plant Arabidopsis to give one of the most comprehensive descriptions of how alternative splicing changes across seasons.