Elucidation of anthocyanin accumulation mechanism by "omics" approach using PAP1 over-expressing mutants (1) -Integration of transcriptomics and metabolomics-

Abstract

The PAP1 gene, which encodes an MYB transcriptional factor, up-regulates the flavonoid biosynthetic gene expression. In this research, we integrated the studies of metabolomics and transcriptomics with wild-type, pap1-D mutant and PAP1-overexpressed transgenic plant, to elucidate a detailed anthocyanin accumulation mechanism.
By metabolome analysis using HPLC-PDA-MS and FT-MS, it was confirmed that PAP1-overexpressing lines highly accumulated 11 cyanidin derivatives in the leaves. In addition, by the transcriptome analysis using Affymetrix GeneChip, 38 up-regulated genes were identified as those encoding glycosyltransferase, acyltransferase and transporter, which are expected to be involved in flavonoid biosynthesis.
These results showed that the PAP1 gene is a transcriptional factor which regulates specifically the anthocyanin accumulation. Our findings suggest that a functional genomics approach is useful for the complete identification of genes for anthocyanin accumulation in Arabidopsis.