A Machine-Learning Analysis of Flowering Gene Expression in the CDC Frontier Chickpea Cultivar

Abstract

Abstract—We have analyzed the gene expression dynamics in floral transition in the CDC Frontier chickpea cultivar. We provide a model, in several versions, to predict the expression dynamics of five flowering genes, taking the expression of their regulators as an input. The models were trained using the random forest method on the previously published expression data for ten flowering genes under the short- and long-day growing conditions. The resulting models correctly predict the dynamics of the average expression levels under long days. We show that the models for CDC Frontier mainly reproduce the regulatory interactions between the key genes described for the Arabidopsis thaliana model plant. Based on the analysis, we hypothesize that the short-day data and the long-day data contain qualitatively different information, which may be due to different regulatory modules that function in different conditions. For the regulators of the flower meristem identity genes AP1 and LFY, our models predict FTa3 as the main activator and TFL1c as the main repressor under long days.