Comparative Co-expression Analysis between Soybean and Arabidopsis

Arabidopsis thaliana, an important model species, is widely used in biology research, and employing its knowledge to study other related species is one of the major applications. Soybean is a major legume crop and it is of great economic and nutritional value. Therefore, many co-expression databases including these two species are constructed. But, there is little research focused on the differences of their orthologous gene co-expression relationship. In this paper, we calculated the general co-expression coefficient of any two genes in orthologous genes, compared the differences of this coefficient between Arabidopsis and Soybean, and analyzed the similarity of these two species. Although many studies on Soybean are based on the orthologous relationship with Arabidopsis, our results show that there only about 38.85% gene pairs are similar between the two species. Our study indicates that researchers should have an eye on these existed differences when conducting research on Arabidopsis and Soybean.