Abstract
A variety of tissue/organ specific transcription factors are known as critical determinants of differentiation and developmental processes in plants. On the other hand, many of downstream events under the regulations of such specific transcription factors, particularly biochemical reactions, still remain unresolved. Although no almighty analytical means has been developed towards understanding such biochemical events, potential of integrated approaches of transcriptomics and metabolomics has been proven in exploiting novel gene functions in plant secondary metabolic pathways.
In this study, we focused on several cytochromes P450 and transcription factors, of which gene co-expression patterns have been suggested to occur specifically in flowers. Thus, cDNAs for those P450s and transcription factors were overexpressed in Arabidopsis T87 cells, and those cell lines, together with T-DNA insertion lines, were subjected to an FT-ICR/MS based metabolomics. We discuss P450 dependent metabolic pathway activities in flower buds through multivariate analyses and specific metabolite accumulation patterns.
