Systems Biology Approach to Understand Seed Composition

摘要

As the propagule that ensures the dissemination of plants, seeds also support human activity as one of the major products of agriculture. The biochemical storage reserves that are deposited within the seed during its development chemically fall into three general categories, proteins, oils and carbohydrates. The seed reserves are biosynthesized by the programmed expression of a metabolic network during seed development. In most commercial lines of soybean grown in the Midwestern states of the US, seeds are composed of 40% protein, 20% oil, 15% soluble carbohydrates, and 15% fiber. There is considerable knowledge concerning the basic biochemical processes by which imported carbon and nitrogen is converted to the final products, protein, oil and carbohydrate. However, there is a great deal to be learned concerning the molecular, biochemical and genetic mechanisms that regulate this complex metabolic network. Recent developments in genomics have provided the catalogue of genes that would be required for this process. We have taken advantage of combined metabolomics and tran-scriptomics technologies to identify the global developmental and biochemical transcriptomics network, and ultimately determine structure and composition of the mature seed. Also, we have coupled this with bioinformatics and metabolic flux analyses to gain insights as to the biochemical programs that determine soybean seed development. For this purpose, we have developed Plant & Microbial Metabolomics Resource, a platform to empower the use of metabolomics data in the development of hypotheses concerning the organization and regulation of metabolic networks, and MetNet systems biology platform for plant 'omics, a web-based framework which enables interactive visualization of metabolic and regulatory networks. This combination of genetic resources, high-throughput experimental data and bioinformatic analyses has revealed sets of specific genes, genetic perturbations and mechanisms, and metabolic changes that are associated seed composition during soybean seed development.