Abstract
To obtain a complete understanding of how a seed is made, it is important to identify and characterize the biological processes that occur in the different seed tissues at different stages of development. Arabidopsis is an important model plant amenable to the study of most aspects of plant biology; however, it offers considerable challenges when studying seed development due to the small size of the seeds. The development of new technologies, such as laser microdissection for isolating individual tissue types and RNA amplification methods that allow microarray analysis to be performed starting with nanogram quantities of RNA, has provided detailed transcriptome data. This chapter summarizes the transcriptome data that is available for Arabidopsis seeds and provides an example of how this data can be analyzed to identify gene networks involved in the different biological processes within a developing seed.