Superior Cross-Species Reference Genes: A Blueberry Case Study

The advent of affordable Next Generation Sequencing technologies has had major impact on studies of many crop species, where access to genomic technologies and genome-scale data sets has been extremely limited until now. The recent development of genomic resources in blueberry will enable the application of high throughput gene expression approaches that should relatively quickly increase our understanding of blueberry physiology. These studies, however, require a highly accurate and robust workflow and make necessary the identification of reference genes with high expression stability for correct target gene normalization. To create a set of superior reference genes for blueberry expression analyses, we mined a publicly available transcriptome data set from blueberry for orthologs to a set of Arabidopsis genes that showed the most stable expression in a developmental series. In total, the expression stability of 13 putative reference genes was evaluated by qPCR and a set of new references with high stability values across a developmental series in fruits and floral buds of blueberry were identified. We also demonstrated the need to use at least two, preferably three, reference genes to avoid inconsistencies in results, even when superior reference genes are used. The new references identified here provide a valuable resource for accurate normalization of gene expression in Vaccinium spp. and may be useful for other members of the Ericaceae family as well.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2013-09-18

• Fields of study

  Agricultural and Food Sciences, Medicine, Biology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0073354PMID 24058469PMCID 3776805
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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