Plants undergo rapid developmental transitions, which occur contemporaneously with gradual changes in physiology. Moreover, individual plants within a population undergo developmental transitions asynchronously. Single-plant-omics has the potential to distinguish between transcriptional events that are associated with these binary and continuous processes. Furthermore, we can use single-plant-omics to order individual plants by their intrinsic biological age, providing a high-resolution transcriptional time series. We performed RNA-seq on leaves from a large population of wild-type Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) during the vegetative-to-reproductive transition. Though most transcripts were differentially expressed between bolted and unbolted plants, some regulators were more closely associated with leaf size and biomass. Using a pseudotime inference algorithm, we determined that some senescence-associated processes, such as the reduction in ribosome biogenesis, were evident in the transcriptome before a bolt was visible. Even in this near-isogenic population, some variants are associated with developmental traits. These results support the use of single-plant-omics to uncover rapid transcriptional dynamics by exploiting developmental asynchrony.

中文翻译：

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单植物组学揭示了营养到生殖过渡过程中转录变化的级联反应


植物经历快速的发育转变，这与生理学的逐渐变化同时发生。此外，种群中的单个植物异步经历发育转变。单植物组学有可能区分与这些二元和连续过程相关的转录事件。此外，我们可以使用单植物组学按植物的内在生物年龄对单个植物进行排序，从而提供高分辨率的转录时间序列。在营养到生殖的过渡期间，我们对大量野生型拟南芥 （Arabidopsis thaliana） 的叶子进行了 RNA-seq。尽管大多数转录本在插蔼和解插植物之间表达差异，但一些调节因子与叶子大小和生物量更密切相关。使用伪时间推理算法，我们确定一些与衰老相关的过程，例如核糖体生物发生的减少，在可见螺栓之前在转录组中很明显。即使在这个近乎同基因的人群中，一些变异也与发育性状有关。这些结果支持使用单植物组学通过利用发育异步来揭示快速转录动力学。