Abstract
Fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) is a powerful method for the analysis of cell type-specific transcriptome profiles, DNA or histone modifications, and chemical compounds. In plants, it has been employed mainly with root and shoot tissue in combination with cell wall digestion on cellular and nuclear content. However, many tissues are recalcitrant to cell separation and are therefore not readily accessible for FACS analysis. Here, we lay out a detailed protocol for the generation of transcriptional profiles from fluorescently labeled nuclei. The protocol described in this chapter has been used successfully to generate a transcriptional map of the early Arabidopsis thaliana embryo.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Mayer U, Jürgens G (1998) Pattern formation in plant embryogenesis: a reassessment. Semin Cell Dev Biol 9:187–193. doi:10.1006/scdb.1997.0210
Galbraith DW, Birnbaum K (2006) Global studies of cell type-specific gene expression in plants. Annu Rev Plant Biol 57:451–475. doi:10.1146/annurev.arplant.57.032905.105302
Gautam V, Sarkar AK (2015) Laser assisted microdissection, an efficient technique to understand tissue specific gene expression patterns and functional genomics in plants. Mol Biotechnol 57:299–308. doi:10.1007/s12033-014-9824-3
Birnbaum K, Jung JW, Wang JY, Lambert GM, Hirst JA, Galbraith DW et al (2005) Cell type-specific expression profiling in plants via cell sorting of protoplasts from fluorescent reporter lines. Nat Methods 2:615–619. doi:10.1038/nmeth0805-615
Iyer-Pascuzzi AS, Benfey PN (2010) Fluorescence-activated cell sorting in plant developmental biology. Methods Mol Biol 655:313–319. doi:10.1007/978-1-60761-765-5_21
Birnbaum K, Shasha DE, Wang JY, Jung JW, Lambert GM, Galbraith DW et al (2003) A gene expression map of the Arabidopsis root. Science 302:1956–1960. doi:10.1126/science.1090022
Brady SM, Orlando DA, Lee J-Y, Wang JY, Koch J, Dinneny JR et al (2007) A high-resolution root spatiotemporal map reveals dominant expression patterns. Science 318:801–806. doi:10.1126/science.1146265
Deal RB, Henikoff S (2011) The INTACT method for cell type-specific gene expression and chromatin profiling in Arabidopsis thaliana. Nat Protoc 6:56–68. doi:10.1038/nprot.2010.175
Zhang C, Barthelson RA, Lambert GM, Galbraith DW (2008) Global characterization of cell-specific gene expression through fluorescence-activated sorting of nuclei. Plant Physiol 147:30–40. doi:10.1104/pp.107.115246
Slane D, Kong J, Schmid M, Jürgens G, Bayer M (2015) Profiling of embryonic nuclear vs. cellular RNA in Arabidopsis thaliana. Genom Data 4:96–98. doi:10.1016/j.gdata.2015.03.015
Slane D, Kong J, Berendzen KW, Kilian J, Henschen A, Kolb M et al (2014) Cell type-specific transcriptome analysis in the early Arabidopsis thaliana embryo. Development 141:4831–4840. doi:10.1242/dev.116459
Khodosevich K, Inta D, Seeburg PH, Monyer H (2007) Gene expression analysis of in vivo fluorescent cells. PLoS One 2. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001151
Weinhofer I, Köhler C (2014) Plant epigenetics and epigenomics. Methods Mol Biol 1112:105–115. doi:10.1007/978-1-62703-773-0
Acknowledgments
The research in our group is funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, BA3356/2-1 and SFB1101 to M.B.) and the Max Planck Society. This protocol is based on previously published work [11]. We like to thank Joachim Kilian, Kenneth W. Berendzen, Jixiang Kong, and Gerd Jürgens for the support and help in establishing the initial protocol.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer Science+Business Media LLC
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Slane, D., Bayer, M. (2017). Cell Type-Specific Gene Expression Profiling Using Fluorescence-Activated Nuclear Sorting. In: Kaufmann, K., Mueller-Roeber, B. (eds) Plant Gene Regulatory Networks. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1629. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7125-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7125-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-7124-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-7125-1
eBook Packages: Springer Protocols