Analytical Method Evaluation and Discovery of Variation within Maize Varieties in the Context of Food Safety: Transcript Profiling and Metabolomics

摘要

Profiling techniques such as microarrays, proteomics, and metabolomics are used widely to assess the overall effects of genetic background, environmental stimuli, growth stage or transgene expression in plants To assess the potential regulatory use of these techniques in agricultural biotechnology, we carried out microarray and metabolomic studies of 3 different tissues from 11 conventional maize vaneties We measured technical vanations for both microarrays and metabolomics, compared results from individual plants and corresponding pooled samples, and documented variations detected among different vaneties with individual plants or pooled samples Both microarray and metabolomic technologies are reproducible and can be used to detect plant to plant and variety to variety differences A pooling strategy lowered sample variations for both microarray and metabolomics while captunng variety to variety variation However, unknown genomic sequences differing between maize varieties might hinder the application of microarrays High throughput metabolomics could be useful as a tool for the characterization of transgenic crops However, researchers will have to take into consideration the impact on the detection and quantitation of a wide range of metabolites on experimental design as well as validation and interpretation of results