Abstract
Plant genomes contain numerous genes originating from duplication events. Therefore, it is of interest to address how duplicate genes contributed to metabolic diversities in plants. We showed that recently duplicated genes contribute to a diversity of secondary metabolites in lineage-specific fashion. However, we also showed that these duplicate genes contribute to genetic robustness with preserving the same function. The diversity and redundancy in duplicate genes can be the cause for the hardness to identify genes related to each secondary metabolite. To solve the complexity, we propose a new approach to identify genes related to secondary metabolites by the diversities of secondary metabolites within a species. Using the genome association approach of both genome data and transcriptome data among 20 accessions of A. thaliana, we can infer genes related to each of about 500 known and unknown secondary metabolites in A. thaliana. Finally, I introduce some examples to identify known enzymatic genes of a secondary metabolite by this approach.
