Abstract
In recent years, metabolomics become powerful for identification of novel gene functions by integrating a transcriptome approach. In the present study, we chose silent phenotypes among 50 lines of Arabidopsis EMS mutants that have metabolic changes confirmed by targeted analyses. Silent phenotypes have mutations in their genes but they show little change in their appearances; however, these mutants may show metabolomic changes. Morphological observations for EMS mutants and GC-TOF/MS-based metabolite profiling enabled us to perform silent phenotype selection. The Arabidopsis wild-type (Col-0) and the 50 mutant lines were grown on MS medium. Of these, 64 percent of the mutants were chosen as silent phenotypes because of their morphology. The selected lines were extracted and then analyzed using GC-TOF/MS. Multivariate analysis revealed that 19 percent of the silent phenotypes showed metabolomic changes. Among these silent phenotypes, we selected the mutant called pad2-1, which has reported as the glutathione-deficient mutant. Now, the detailed metabolite profiling of the mutant samples under the oxidization stress condition are conducted using three MS-based metabolomics pipelines.
