Fig. 4

Expression profiles of the growth and defense related genes between ILa and ILb at different kernel developmental stages. (a) There were totally 102 transcription factors (TFs) that were differentially expressed (FC > 1.5 at FDR < 0.05) between ILa and ILb in 8-DAP developing kernels. These differentially expressed TFs were from 18 families, including the 5 MYB, 6 MADS, 15 bZIP, 21NAC, 22 AP2/EREBP, 14 WRKY, and 3 GATA family members. (b) The fold changes (FC) of the auxin-related, kernel development related, or the MADS TFs, based on the FPKM values in ILa and ILb at the three developmental stages. The expression level of most of these DEGs were remarkably higher in ILa transcriptomes than that in the respective ILb transcriptomes, except the DEGs that encoding Yucca2, colorless2 and invertase1, which were all down-regulated in all the ILa transcriptomes than that in the respective ILb transcriptomes. (c) The FC of the defense related DEGs, based on the FPKM in ILa and ILb at the three developmental stages. At 5 DAP, the expression levels of the genes encoding pathongensis-related proteins (PR) were specifically higher in ILa kernel than that in ILb kernel, but the difference reduced at 8 and 10 DAP; the expression level of WRKY member and the POX encoding genes were almost specially higher in ILa 8DAP kernel than that in ILb 8DAP kernel