Abstract
Methionine (Met) is an essential amino acid for all organisms. In plants, Met also functions as a precursor of plant hormones, polyamines, and defense metabolites. The regulatory mechanism of Met biosynthesis is highly complex and, despite its great importance, remains unclear. To investigate how accumulation of Met influences metabolism as a whole in Arabidopsis, three methionine over-accumulation (mto) mutants were examined using a gas chromatography–mass spectrometry-based metabolomics approach. Multivariate statistical analyses of the three mto mutants (mto1, mto2, and mto3) revealed distinct metabolomic phenotypes. Orthogonal projection to latent structures–discriminant analysis highlighted discriminative metabolites contributing to the separation of each mutant and the corresponding control samples. Though Met accumulation in mto1 had no dramatic effect on other metabolic pathways except for the aspartate family, metabolite profiles of mto2 and mto3 indicated that several extensive pathways were affected in addition to over-accumulation of Met. The pronounced changes in metabolic pathways in both mto2 and mto3 were associated with polyamines. The findings suggest that our metabolomics approach not only can reveal the impact of Met over-accumulation on metabolism, but also may provide clues to identify crucial pathways for regulation of metabolism in plants.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Drs. Par Jonsson, Hans Stenlund and Thomas Moritz of UPSC, Sweden, for kindly providing the custom software for data pretreatment. The authors gratefully acknowledge the skilled technical assistance of Ms. Saeko Yasokawa and Ms. Eriko Tanaka of Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. This research was supported by grants from the Japan Science and Technology Agency, CREST (project name: ‘Elucidation of Amino Acid Metabolism in Plants based on Integrated Omics Analyses’).
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M. Kusano and A. Fukushima contributed equally to this work.
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726_2010_562_MOESM2_ESM.ppt
Supplementary Fig 1 Phenotypes of 18-day-old plants grown under a 16 h light/8 h dark photoperiod. To evaluate the difference derived from plates, we grew common WT plants (Col-0, ‘Col-0_R’) on each plate (PPT 415 kb)
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Kusano, M., Fukushima, A., Redestig, H. et al. Comparative metabolomics charts the impact of genotype-dependent methionine accumulation in Arabidopsis thaliana . Amino Acids 39, 1013–1021 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00726-010-0562-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00726-010-0562-y