Fig. 4
Comparison of representative genes involved in cell wall metabolism between sorghum genotypes. Gene expression dynamics are shown in heatmaps for cell wall biosynthetic genes (a) and monolignol biosynthetic genes (b), with the pathway of monolignol biosynthesis shown in c. The cell colors are shaded to reflect the magnitude of log2 fold change of gene expression relative to the anthesis stages in each genotype. The expression levels in RPKM are labeled on each cell with statistical differences (q values determined by edgeR) indicated by asterisk (*q < 0.05; **q < 0.01; ***q < 0.005). The geneIDs highlighted in red are those that share the similar expression trends between sweet lines Rio, Della and SIL05 but contrast to BTx406 and R9188. In b, the monolignol biosynthetic genes with functional evidence in sorghum are underlined, with their gene names or corresponding sorghum mutants labeled according to previous studies [99,100,101,102,103,104,105,106,107]