HybridExpress: an R/Bioconductor package for comparative transcriptomic analyses of hybrids and their progenitors

Abstract

ABSTRACTHybridization, the process of crossing individuals from diverse genetic backgrounds, plays a pivotal role in evolution, biological invasiveness, and crop breeding. 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. Here, we introduceHybridExpress, an R/Bioconductor package designed to facilitate the analysis, visualization, and comparison of gene expression patterns in hybrid triplets (hybrids and their progenitors).HybridExpressprovides 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. We illustrate the utility ofHybridExpressthrough comparative transcriptomic analyses of cotton allopolyploidization and rice root trait heterosis.HybridExpressis designed to streamline comparative transcriptomic studies of hybrid triplets, advancing our understanding of evolutionary dynamics in allopolyploids, and enhancing plant breeding strategies.HybridExpressis freely accessible from Bioconductor (https://bioconductor.org/packages/HybridExpress) and its source code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/almeidasilvaf/HybridExpress).