Total RNA was isolated from the samples of various tissue types using RNAiso Plus (TaKaRa, Japan; http://www.takarabio.com), and was quantified by a Nano Nanodrop ND-2000 Spectrophotometer (Thermo Scientific, USA, http://www.nanodrop.com), as described previously (Cho et al., 2018 (link)). The cDNA was prepared with 10 ng of the oligo (dT)18 primer, 2.5 mM deoxy ribonucleotide triphosphates, and Moloney murine leukemia virus reverse transcriptase. Quantitative real-time RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) was performed with the synthesized cDNAs as templates and the gene-specific primers (Supplementary Table S1), using SYBR Premix Ex Taq™ II (TaKaRa) and the Rotor-Gene 6000 instrument system (Corbett Research, Sydney, Australia; http://www.corbettlifescience.com). Rice ubiquitin 1 (Ubi1) served as an internal control, and at least three biological replicates were analyzed. We used the data only when the melting curve showed a single sharp peak.