Frontiers in Plant Science (Sep 2012)
Functional genomics tools applied to plant metabolism: a survey on plant respiration, its connections and the annotation of complex gene functions
Abstract
The application of post-genomic techniques in plant respiration studies has greatly improved our ability to assign functions to gene products. In addition it has also revealed previously unappreciated interactions between distal elements of metabolism. Such results have reinforced the need to consider plant respiratory metabolism as part of a complex network and making sense of such interactions will ultimately require the construction of predictive and mechanistic models. Transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and the quantification of metabolic flux will be of great value in creating such models both by facilitating the annotation of complex gene function, determining their structure and by furnishing the quantitative data required to test them. In this review we highlight how these experimental approaches have contributed to our current understanding of plant respiratory metabolism and its interplay with associated process (e.g. photosynthesis, photorespiration and nitrogen metabolism). We also discuss how data from these techniques may be integrated, with the ultimate aim of identifying mechanisms that control and regulate plant respiration and discovering novel gene functions with potential biotechnological implications.
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