Differential Alternative Splicing Analysis Under Abiotic Stress Conditions In Barley (Hordeum Vulgare)

Abstract

Biotic and abiotic stress factors adversely affect the growth and development of plants, living in constantly changing environment. Plant abiotic stress responses seem to be frequently associated with the process of alternative splicing. Alternative splicing generates multiple products from a single gene by variable splicing of exons. RNA-seq utilizes NGS platforms to produce massive amount of sequence data. Using transcriptomic data, we tried to identify the differentially spliced genes in barley under heat and cadmium stress. Raw RNA seq data was pre-processed and aligned with reference barley genome. Then differential alternative splicing was analyzed on the basis of intron excision. In this study, a total of 196 significant differentially spliced clusters were found under two abiotic stress conditions, among them 47 and 149 clusters were associated with cadmium and heat stress condition, respectively. Overall, 133 fully annotated clusters and 63 unannotated clusters were observed. Further, annotation was performed for the significant genes to determine their functions. Some of these significant genes encode for splicing factors, stress tolerance protein, non snRNPs and antioxidants. From this study, it was concluded that barley undergo differential spliced events to maintain its homeostasis under different abiotic stress conditions.