Doing Genetic and Genomic Biology Using the Legume Information System and Associated Resources.

In this chapter, we introduce the main components of the Legume Information System ( https://legumeinfo.org ) and several associated resources. Additionally, we provide an example of their use by exploring a biological question: is there a common molecular basis, across legume species, that underlies the photoperiod-mediated transition from vegetative to reproductive development, that is, days to flowering? The Legume Information System (LIS) holds genetic and genomic data for a large number of crop and model legumes and provides a set of online bioinformatic tools designed to help biologists address questions and tasks related to legume biology.

High expression in maize pollen correlates with genetic contributions to pollen fitness as well as with coordinated transcription from neighboring transposable elements.

In flowering plants, gene expression in the haploid male gametophyte (pollen) is essential for sperm delivery and double fertilization. Pollen also undergoes dynamic epigenetic regulation of expression from transposable elements (TEs), but how this process interacts with gene expression is not clearly understood. To explore relationships among these processes, we quantified transcript levels in four male reproductive stages of maize (tassel primordia, microspores, mature pollen, and sperm cells) via RNA-seq.