This repo contains code and data used in the paper "HybridExpress: an R/Bioconductor package for comparative transcriptomic analyses of hybrids and their progenitors"
Reproducible reports for all the analyses we performed are available as a Quarto book at https://almeidasilvaf.github.io/HybridExpress_paper/.
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Hybridization, the process of crossing individuals from diverse genetic backgrounds, plays a pivotal role in evolution, biological invasiveness, and crop breeding.
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At the transcriptional level, hybridization often leads to complex non-additive effects, presenting challenges for understanding its consequences. Although standard transcriptomic analyses exist to compare hybrids to their progenitors, such analyses have not been implemented in a software package, hindering reproducibility.
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We introduce HybridExpress, an R/Bioconductor package designed to facilitate the analysis, visualization, and comparison of gene expression patterns in hybrid triplets (hybrids and their progenitors). HybridExpress provides users with a user-friendly and comprehensive workflow that includes all standard comparative analyses steps, including data normalization, calculation of midparent expression values, sample clustering, expression-based gene classification into categories and classes, and overrepresentation analysis for functional terms.
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We illustrate the utility of HybridExpress through comparative transcriptomic analyses of cotton allopolyploidization and rice root trait heterosis. HybridExpress is designed to streamline comparative transcriptomic studies of hybrid triplets, advancing our understanding of evolutionary dynamics in allopolyploids, and enhancing plant breeding strategies.
Keywords: gene expression, transcriptomic shock, allopolyploidy, hybrid vigor, expression-level dominance.