In the first quarter of the 19th century, the natural philosophers Humphry Davy, Thomas Young, and William Hyde Wollaston dominated science in the UK. Strangely, all three died in 1828–29. But whereas Davy and Young are remembered, Wollaston is largely forgotten; a biography by a friend fizzled out in the 1850s, and his manuscripts disappeared until 1949. Yet, as The Lancet stated in 1888: “although [Wollaston] later on abandoned the practice of the healing art for physical research, his genius and his achievements must ever remain prized and treasured ornaments of the profession”.
Differences between wild-type Populus tremulaxalba and two transgenic lines with modified lignin monomer composition, were interrogated using metabolic profiling. Analysis of metabolite abundance data by GC-MS, coupled with principal components analysis (PCA), successfully differentiated between lines that had distinct phenotypes, whether samples were taken from the cambial zone or non-lignifying suspension tissue cultures. Interestingly, the GC-MS analysis detected relatively few phenolic metabolites in cambial extracts, although a single metabolite associated with the differentiation between lines was directly related to the phenylpropanoid pathway or other down-stream aspects of lignin biosynthesis. In fact, carbohydrates, which have only an indirect relationship with the modified lignin monomer composition, featured strongly in the line-differentiating aspects of the statistical analysis. Traditional HPLC analysis was employed to verify the GC-MS data. These findings demonstrate that metabolic traits can be dissected reliably and accurately by metabolomic analyses, enabling the discrimination of individual genotypes of the same tree species that exhibit marked differences in industrially relevant wood traits. Furthermore, this validates the potential of using metabolite profiling techniques for marker generation in the context of plant/tree breeding for industrial applications.
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The advances in 'high-throughput' biology have significantly expanded our fundamental understanding of complex biological processes inherent to tree growth and development. Relative to the significant achievements attained with whole genome re-sequencing and transcriptomics efforts, the development and power of post-transcriptional tools such as proteomics and metabolomics continue to lag behind in tree biology. However, the inclusion of these powerful functional genomics platforms should substantially enable systems biology assessments of tree development, physiology and response(s) to biotic and abiotic stresses. Herein, we employ a non-targeted metabolomics platform to elucidate the metabolic plasticity of xylem lignification in distinct hybrid poplar genetic backgrounds, as well as in transgenic trees in these backgrounds expressing two common constructs: the first construct (C4H::F5H) augments monolignol content (syringyl:guaiacyl (S:G) ratio), while the second construct (C3'H-RNAi) reduces cell wall lignification. The results clearly show that genotype-specific metabolism exists, and provide an appropriate foundation for properly comparing the influence of background on the relationships between metabolic and specific phenotypic traits. Moreover, it was apparent that transgene-induced phenotypic gradients in cell wall chemical wood can be associated with global metabolism of secondary xylem biosynthesis, however in a genotype-specific manner. This result implies that the same may be true for phenotypic gradients arising through natural genetic variation, intensive breeding or environmental factors. It is also apparent that while distinct, at a global level the wood-forming metabolisms of different poplar hybrids can, to some extent, respond similarly to the influences of genetic manipulation of lignin-related genes. This further implies that with the correct approach, it may be possible to associate the emergence of specific wood traits from different genetic backgrounds-be they transgene-induced or otherwise-with stable metabolic signatures.
The term “proteome” defi nes the expressed protein complement of a genome and was, according to a review by Thiellement et al. (2002), fi rst introduced in 1994 by Wilkins at a conference. The roots of this concept, however, date back to 1975 with the development of high resolution 2-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, abbreviated as 2-D PAGE or 2-DE. The fi rst plant large-scale proteomic work was published on Arabidopsis thaliana (Kamo et al. 1995). During the following years, proteomics emerged as a complementary approach to the analysis of genome expression at the mRNA level.
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