Many rapidly developing systems rely on the use of stored transcripts to carry out

their developmental program. The microspore of M. vestita transcribes and stores RNA

during a requisite period of desiccation. Rehydration of the microspore triggers

spermatogenesis to begin, a process that is mediated by the utilization of these stored

RNAs. Here I investigate mechanisms controlling the spatial and temporal utilization of

these stored transcripts. Next generation Solexa based RNAseq was conducted using

poly(A)+ RNA isolates from specific time ranges during spermatogenesis. A reference

transcriptome as well as temporally specific transcriptomes were assembled de novo and

analyzed for gene ontology enrichments. This analysis revealed an overrepresentation of

catalytic splicing and nuclear speckle factors early in development suggesting that some

transcripts are not fully mature. An in house Visual Basic for Applications program was

used to identify potential intron retaining transcripts (IRTs) within our transcriptomes. A

large subset of IRTs was identified and in silico and molecular biological approaches

demonstrated that these IRTs are matured in a spliceosome dependent fashion at different

times during development. Intron retention appears to confer a translational block to IRTs

and splicing of retained introns alleviates this block. IRTs appear to be associated with

splicing machinery organized in nuclear speckles. These subnuclear domains aggregate

during desiccation and upon rehydration are proportioned asymmetrically to

spermatogeneous cells. It appears that intron retention mediates both the association and

asymmetric distribution of IRTs with nuclear speckles as well as their temporal

utilization through post-transcriptional splicing.