Poster abstracts
Poster number 48 submitted by Carmen Rodriguez
Transciptional and Translational Dynamics of Transposable Elements
Carmen Rodriguez (The Ohio State University, MCDB, Molecular Genetics, Columbus USA), Veronica Perez (Cornell University, Plant Biology, Ithaca USA), Shujun Ou (The Ohio State University, MCDB, Molecular Genetics, Columbus USA)
Abstract:
Understanding the relationship between the transcriptome and the translatome is critical for deciphering how plants like maize (Zea mays) navigate environmental stressors. While transcriptional responses to cold stress are well-documented, the degree to which these changes translate into protein synthesis for repetitive elements still remains poorly understood. In this study, we performed a comparative analysis of total RNA and polysomal-associated RNA in maize under cold-stress conditions. Global concordance analysis revealed that while many transcripts show correlated changes, a distinct subset of Long Terminal Repeat (LTR) retrotransposons exhibits significant shifts in translation, indicating decoupled regulatory patterns. Interestingly, Venn diagram analysis showed limited overlap between transcriptional and translational responses, with only 45 upregulated features synchronized at both levels. Density distribution plots demonstrate that transposable elements (TEs) show a significant positive shift in polysomal RNA abundance relative to total RNA, suggesting they are actively recruited to ribosomes during cold stress. These findings indicate that there are distinct translation during abiotic stress, highlighting a novel layer of post-transcriptional regulation in the maize stress response and suggesting a potential functional role for TE-derived transcripts in genome plasticity.
References:
Thank you to Dr. Veronica Perez and Dr. Jian Hua for sharing their polysomal dataset.
[1] Jin Y, et al. (2015) Bioinformatics, 31(22). [2] Zhou X, et al. (2022) Front. Plant Sci., 13.
[3 Enders TA, et al. (2019) Plant Direct, 3(1).[4] Stergachis et al., (2020) Science.
Keywords: Transposable Elements, Abiotic Stress, Maize