The use of functional genomics to understand components of plant metabolism and the regulation occurring at molecular, cellular and whole plant levels
Capitolo
Data di Pubblicazione:
2007
Citazione:
The use of functional genomics to understand components of plant metabolism and the regulation occurring at molecular, cellular and whole plant levels / P. Pesaresi - In: Improvement of Crop Plants for Industrial End Uses / [a cura di] P. Ranalli. - Dordrecht : Springer, 2007. - ISBN 978-1-4020-5485-3. - pp. 1-26 [10.1007/978-1-4020-5486-0_1]
Abstract:
The completion of the genome sequence of the small weed plant Arabidopsis
thaliana (The Arabidopsis genome initiative 2000), and more recently
of rice (Goff et al. 2002; Yu et al. 2002, 2005), has greatly changed
the face of plant biology. Knowing the exact sequence and location of all
the genes of a given organism is the first step towards understanding how
all parts of a biological system work together. Information about the hypothesized
function of an unknown gene may be deduced from its sequence
homology to other genes of known function. However, genome sequencing
projects have revealed the existence of a tremendous amount of
biological diversity, with large proportion of genes sharing no homology to
genes with known or hypothesized functions. In this respect functional genomics
is the key approach to transforming quantity into quality (Borevitz
and Ecker 2004; Holtfort et al. 2002). Functional genomics is a general
approach toward understanding how the genes of an organism work together by assigning new functions to unknown genes. For efficient gene
function analysis, researchers can choose from a multitude of different
methods, most of them derived from genomic research performed on
model organisms such as yeast, nematodes, flies and mice, not forgetting
the technological spin-offs that were inspired by the human genome project.
Arabidopsis populations, mutagenized by random insertion of T-DNA
or transposon elements, have been generated with the aim to perform highthroughput
reverse genetics studies and comprehensive forward genetics
studies of the entire gene compendium (Alonso et al. 2003). Additionally,
information about the spatial and temporal expression pattern of a gene can
be gained from analysis of qualitative and quantitative changes of messenger
RNAs, proteins, and metabolites. These techniques, able to simultaneously
analyze large numbers of transcripts, proteins and chemical constituents,
have led to the creation of new research fields within functional
genomics, named transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. Each
method has its inherent limitations and none of them alone is sufficient to
assign a function to a gene of interest. However, the organization of the
vast amount of data from the various approaches into central databases allows
easy extraction and comparison of meaningful information.
This chapter has the aim to highlight the major approaches that makes
up modern plant functional genomics and to describe how they add a new
dimension to the comprehension of plant biology with particular emphasis
to the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana.
Tipologia IRIS:
03 - Contributo in volume
Elenco autori:
P. Pesaresi
Link alla scheda completa:
Titolo del libro:
Improvement of Crop Plants for Industrial End Uses