Kingdom-wide resource for gene expression in plants

Abstract

Diverse plant groups can benefit humanity in various ways. To date, there is untapped knowledge in 380000 publicly-available plant RNA-seq samples. Currently, several databases repurpose large numbers of RNA-seq samples for several species, allowing biologists to gain insights from these data. However, many species are still not represented in the existing databases despite the availability of data. We have previously developed the software capability to process all the plant RNA-seq data in less than a month and obtained organ annotations. These pave the way for this project, which sets out to develop a web application (Plant Gene Expression Omnibus) to make gene expression insights for 103 species accessible to biologists. Currently, we address how a gene is expressed across organs, its organ specificity, and also identify all specifically-expressed genes for each organ. The design is scalable to include more species and more advanced features, and we discuss the next steps for development, to contribute towards realizing kingdom-wide gene expression analysis.