セミナー情報

Plants produce chemically-diverse secondary metabolites derived from primary metabolites. In general, primary metabolites including amino acids have fundamental functions in every aspects of life, and hence, primary metabolism is regulated so as to be robust against environmental perturbation. On the other hand, a major role of secondary metabolism is to supply the compounds which have specific biological functions (insect repellents, UV protectants, etc.) in response to environmental stimuli. Hence, secondary metabolism is presumably regulated so as to respond dynamically to environmental changes. To understand plant metabolism and its regulation, we are taking the omics-based strategy. We found that coexpression analysis based on a large-scale transcriptome dataset of Arabidopsis is an effective means in finding the candidate genes involved in secondary metabolism. We revealed a set of the genes involved in biosynthesis of glucosinolates, health-promoting secondary metabolites found mainly in Brassicaceae plants including various vegetables. Modulation of the expression of these genes affected both glucosinolate and amino acid contents, suggesting complicated relationship between amino acid metabolism and secondary metabolism. Recently, we have established a high-throughput metabolic profiling methodology called “widely targeted metabolomics”, which enabled us to acquire a large-scale dataset of metabolic profiles of crops. In this presentation, our recent results based on transcriptomics and widely targeted metabolomics will be introduced .

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