Cytonuclear Variation of Rubisco in Synthesized Rice Hybrids and Allotetraploids.

The allopolyploid speciation process faces the genomic challenge of stoichiometric disruption caused by merging biparental nuclear genomes with only one (usually maternal) of the two sets of progenitor cytoplasmic genomes. The photosynthetic protein 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco) is composed of nuclear-encoded small subunits (SSUs) and plastome-encoded large subunits (LSUs), making it an ideal enzyme to explore the evolution process of cytonuclear accommodation. We investigated the variation of SSUs and their encoding genes in synthetic nascent rice ( L.) allotetraploid lineages, formed from the parental subspecies and of Asian rice. The evolution of genes in rice subspecies involves both mutation and concerted homogenization. Within reciprocal rice hybrids and allopolyploids, there was no consistent pattern of biased expression of alleles or homeologs, nor was there biased gene conversion favoring the maternal gene copies. Instead, we observed an apparently stochastic pattern of intergenomic gene conversions and biased expression of homeologs. We conclude that in young rice allopolyploids, cytonuclear coordination either is not selectively favored because of high parental sequence similarity or because there has been insufficient time for subtle selective effects to become observable.

Mutation of a major CG methylase in rice causes genome-wide hypomethylation, dysregulated genome expression, and seedling lethality.

Cytosine methylation at CG sites ((m)CG) plays critical roles in development, epigenetic inheritance, and genome stability in mammals and plants. In the dicot model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, methyltransferase 1 (MET1), a principal CG methylase, functions to maintain (m)CG during DNA replication, with its null mutation resulting in global hypomethylation and pleiotropic developmental defects. Null mutation of a critical CG methylase has not been characterized at a whole-genome level in other higher eukaryotes, leaving the generality of the Arabidopsis findings largely speculative. Rice is a model plant of monocots, to which many of our important crops belong. Here we have characterized a null mutant of OsMet1-2, the major CG methylase in rice. We found that seeds homozygous for OsMet1-2 gene mutation (OsMET1-2(-/-)), which directly segregated from normal heterozygote plants (OsMET1-2(+/-)), were seriously maldeveloped, and all germinated seedlings underwent swift necrotic death. Compared with wild type, genome-wide loss of (m)CG occurred in the mutant methylome, which was accompanied by a plethora of quantitative molecular phenotypes including dysregulated expression of diverse protein-coding genes, activation and repression of transposable elements, and altered small RNA profiles. Our results have revealed conservation but also distinct functional differences in CG methylases between rice and Arabidopsis.