NEWS

Main Points

• Creation of the AtMetExpress database of secondary metabolites for Arabidopsis
• Different organs such as flowers, roots and seeds synthesize completely different secondary metabolites.
• Will help to speed the discovery of new useful components and metabolite-related genes as well as contribute to deriving useful compounds indispensable to modern society.

RIKEN has created the world’s first database of secondary metabolites from the various organs of the Arabidopsis thaliana model plant. The database uses data from PSC’s Metabolomics Research Group’s Metabolism Analysis Research Team. PSC has been proactively developing technologies for investigating the metabolome?that is, the range of metabolic products in an organism.

Plants have developed a host of protective responses to deal with the stress caused by ultraviolet rays, insect pests and pathogenic microbes. The source of these capabilities is secondary metabolites, many of which have proven useful to humans for health and medical purposes. There is a need to evaluate different plant parts to determine which secondary metabolites exist in what quantities in order to use such secondary metabolites more effectively.

The Metabolomics Research Group used liquid chromatography?mass spectrometry (LC-MS) to analyze samples of 36 parts of Arabidopsis (e.g., flowers, roots, seeds, leaves, stems) and create a dataset of more than 1500 metabolites, called AtMetExpress. This database shows clearly demonstrates that Arabidopsis produces and accumulates various metabolites in a highly tissue-specific manner, suggesting that additional secondary metabolites useful to humans could be found by reviewing the natural mechanisms by which plants carry out organic synthesis in terms of their seeds and flowers.

These results also suggest that integration of AtMetExpress data with the AtGenExpress data for transcriptomes (a collaborative project in which PSC participated) should lead to the discovery of genes involved in the production of various metabolites.

The creation of other plant species databases to determine useful components and metabolite-related genes will make possible the prediction of secondary metabolite functions. The result will be more efficient acquisition of the medical, food and industrial products that are indispensable to modern society.

These research results were published in the December 18 issue of Plant Physiology.