The metabolic signature related to high plant growth rate in Arabidopsis thaliana

doi:10.1073/pnas.0609709104

The metabolic signature related to high plant growth rate in Arabidopsis thaliana

Departments of *Genetics and
^‡Bioinformatics, Institute of Biochemistry and Biology, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 24–25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany; and
^§Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Am Muehlenberg 1, 14476 Golm, Germany

Edited by Maarten Koornneef, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Wageningen, The Netherlands, and approved January 3, 2007 (received for review November 1, 2006)

Abstract

The decline of available fossil fuel reserves has triggered world-wide efforts to develop alternative energy sources based on plant biomass. Detailed knowledge of the relations of metabolism and biomass accumulation can be expected to yield powerful novel tools to accelerate and enhance energy plant breeding programs. We used metabolic profiling in the model Arabidopsis to study the relation between biomass and metabolic composition using a recombinant inbred line (RIL) population. A highly significant canonical correlation (0.73) was observed, revealing a close link between biomass and a specific combination of metabolites. Dividing the entire data set into training and test sets resulted in a median correlation between predicted and true biomass of 0.58. The demonstrated high predictive power of metabolic composition for biomass features this composite measure as an excellent biomarker and opens new opportunities to enhance plant breeding specifically in the context of renewable resources.

Footnotes

^†To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rcmeyer{at}uni-potsdam.de
Author contributions: R.C.M., M.S., and J.L. contributed equally to this work; R.C.M., M.S., O.F., L.W., J.S., and T.A. designed research; R.C.M., M.S., J.L., M.B., H.W.-W., O.T., and Ä.E. performed research; J.L. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; R.C.M., M.S., J.L., and J.S. analyzed data; and R.C.M., M.S., J.L., L.W., J.S., and T.A. wrote the paper.
↵ ^¶Present address: University of California at Davis Genome Center, GBSF Building Room 1315, 451 East Health Sciences Drive, Davis, CA 95616-8816.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS direct submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0609709104/DC1.
Abbreviations:

RIL,

recombinant inbred line;

CCA,

canonical correlation analysis;

PLS,

partial least square;

TCA,

tricarboxylic acid;

QTL,

quantitative trait loci.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.