Transcriptome profiling of flax plants exposed to a low-frequency alternating electromagnetic field

Abstract

All living organisms on Earth evolved in the presence of an electromagnetic field (EMF), adapted to the environment of EMF, and even learned to utilize it for their purposes. However, during the last century, the Earth’s core lost its exclusivity, and many EMF sources appeared due to the development of electricity and electronics. Previous research suggested that the EMF led to changes in intercellular free radical homeostasis and further altered the expression of genes involved in plant response to environmental stresses, inorganic ion transport, and cell wall constituent biosynthesis. Later, CTCT sequence motifs in gene promoters were proposed to be responsible for the response to EMF. How these motifs or different mechanisms are involved in the plant reaction to external EMF remains unknown. Moreover, as many genes activated under EMF treatment do not have the CTCT repeats in their promoters, we aimed to determine the transcription profile of a plant exposed to an EMF and identify the genes that are directly involved in response to the treatment to find the common denominator of the observed changes in the plant transcriptome.

Key FAD2, FAD3, and SAD Genes Involved in the Fatty Acid Synthesis in Flax Identified Based on Genomic and Transcriptomic Data

“…The obtained flax genomes opened up new opportunities for the identification and comparison of the SAD, FAD2, and FAD3 genes of different flax genotypes. In addition to whole-genome sequencing, a significant number of transcriptomes have been obtained for flax plants in recent years [59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75]. Such studies enabled extensive analysis of SAD, FAD2, and FAD3 expression in different organs/tissues and during various developmental stages and under various stress conditions.…”