Abstract
Thellungiella halophila(salt cress), is a model halophyte system with a small plant size, short life cycle, copious seed production, a small genome and an efficient transformation, and can grow in 500 mM NaCl medium. Its genes have a high sequence identity (90-95% at cDNA level) to genes of its close relative Arabidopsis thaliana. Previously, we analyzed the gene expression profiles in T.halophilaby using A. thaliana cDNA microarray. A large number of known abiotic- and biotic-stress inducible genes were highly expressed in T.halophilaeven in the absence of stress. It suggests that stress tolerance of T.halophilamay be due to constitutive overexpression of these genes. In the present study, we performed metabolome analysis using LC/MS, GC/MS and CE/MS toshow different metabolic profiles between Arabidopsis and T.halophila. Furthermore, to identify key genes controlling the metabolites, we analyzed gene expression profiles of T.halophilausing Arabidopsis 22k oligoarray.
