Journal Article

Metabolomic approaches toward understanding nitrogen metabolism in plants

Fukushima, Atsushi, Kusano, Miyako, Redestig, Henning, Saito, Kazuki

2011

Overview

Plants can assimilate inorganic nitrogen (N) sources to organic N such as amino acids. N is the most important of the mineral nutrients required by plants and its metabolism is tightly coordinated with carbon (C) metabolism in the fundamental processes that permit plant growth. Increased understanding of N regulation may provide important insights for plant growth and improvement of quality of crops and vegetables because N as well as C metabolism are fundamental components of plant life. Metabolomics is a global biochemical approach useful to study N metabolism because metabolites not only reflect the ultimate phenotypes (traits), but can mediate transcript levels as well as protein levels directly and/or indirectly under different N conditions. This review outlines analytical and bioinformatic techniques particularly used to perform metabolomics for studying N metabolism in higher plants. Examples are used to illustrate the application of metabolomic techniques to the model plants Arabidopsis and rice, as well as other crops and vegetables.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Subject: Amino acid metabolism / Amino acids / analytical methods / Arabidopsis / Arabidopsis - metabolism / carbon / Cellular metabolism / chemistry / crop quality / Crops, Agricultural / Crops, Agricultural - metabolism / Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry / Lipid metabolism / Mass Spectrometry / Metabolism / Metabolites / Metabolomics / Models, Biological / nitrogen / Nitrogen - chemistry / Nitrogen - metabolism / Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Biomolecular / nutrients / Oryza / Oryza - metabolism / phenotype / plant growth / Plants / proteins / REVIEW PAPER / Rice / vegetable crops