Plant Metabolomics: Small Molecules Take Center Stage

The advancement of genomics technologies in the last decade has been extremely rapid and the opportunity for novel experimentation profound. However, whilst there has been much focus on large molecules (DNA, RNA and protein), small molecules have been somewhat neglected in international efforts. This is odd given the essential importance of small molecules in determining functional performance and phenotype and our emerging understanding of their role as signals that interplay with and regulate gene expression and protein activity in biological networks. In this presentation the importance of the analysis of small molecules via metabolite profiling will be introduced and illustrated with examples from the work of metanomics, a company which has pioneered industrial metabolomics. Today laboratories are operated with some 60 mass spectrometers allowing a throughput of >100,000 samples per year. This capability has been deployed in plant functional genomics: the company has generated large, unique, populations of Arabidopsis and crop plants where genes have been systematically overexpressed or knocked out at a genome scale. Screening the metabolite profiles of these transgenic lines enables genes to be rapidly selected which influence and control commercially important areas of metabolism e.g. oils, amino acids, vitamins or sugars. Further the linking of metabolic data to genetic and phenotypic data has been demonstrated to be of particular importance and the status of such system biology approaches based on metabolite profiling data will be reviewed.