Identifiying Novel Genes Potentially Involved in Maize Ear Meristem Development through Single-Cell Transcriptomics

Abstract

Maize (Zea mays) is one of the most widely planted food crops globally, with the maize ear being harvested for both human and animal consumption. The development of the maize ear is driven by undifferentiated cells called shoot meristem cells, which are located inside developing ear shoots and are responsible for the growth of all above-ground organs. Single cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a cutting-edge tool that can quantify transcriptional levels of genes in individual cells of a given tissue sample. This technique could help identify genes that are only expressed in meristem cells and thus would be overlooked by bulk RNA sequencing techniques. Previous research has generated scRNA-seq data from developing maize ears, including both differentiated and undifferentiated cells. We seek to use previously collected scRNA-seq data to discover unknown genes that may potentially be important for maintaining the undifferentiated status of stem cells using cluster analysis and gene co-expression networks to compare the expression of shoot meristem cells against various differentiated cells. Knowing which genes are important for undifferentiated status gives us the ability to use gene editing to change differentiated cells into meristem cells. Since meristem cells are responsible for growing all organs, this allows us to grow whole plants from that one cell and obtain seeds. Future studies would be able to genome edit any cell and then change it to be a meristem cell, greatly speeding up the time it takes to produce new strains of maize.