Award details

Identification of transcription factors regulating plant secondary metabolism through the integration of functional genomics and metabolomics

Reference	BBS/E/J/000CA251
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Cathie Martin
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	John Innes Centre
Department	John Innes Centre Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	207,995
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	03/04/2006
End date	02/04/2009
Duration	36 months

Abstract

Plants produce a very broad array of metabolites, which are not essential for growth of cells. These are often referred to as plant 'natural products'. Plants often accumulate their natural products to relatively low levels, so there is a lot of interest in breeding or engineering plants that produce higher levels. It has been shown that the most effective way to increase the accumulation of secondary metabolites is to increase the activity of genes that regulate the activity of the biosynthetic pathways that make different natural products. Regulatory genes of this type encode proteins called transcription factors. The biggest bottleneck in using this strategy to develop plants that accumulate significantly higher levels of important natural products is that not many transcription factors regulating secondary metabolism have yet been identified at the molecular level. This proposal aims to identify transcription factors from the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, that control different branches of secondary metabolism. This will be achieved by studying a selected group of genes that encode transcription factors that probably regulate secondary metabolism. The activity of each of 38 such genes will be increased and the effects on metabolism will be measured by physico-chemical techniques that can identify major differences in the levels of small organic molecules (metabolites) within plant extracts. Genes that have the same regulatory activity will be identified because increasing their activity will result in exactly the same changes in metabolites. The aim will be to identify all the proteins that have the same regulatory activities and then to choose one example from each distinct activity group to establish the effects of loss of that activity on metabolite levels. This will be done using sensitive techniques of separation coupled with quantitative identification by mass spectrometry.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Genes & Developmental Biology (GDB)
Research Topics	Plant Science
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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