New resource reveals biochemical pathways in important crop plants

A new online database has been launched that reveals unprecedented views of the biochemical pathways controlling the metabolism of essential crop plants.

The Plant Metabolic Network documents the biochemical pathways of corn, soybeans, wine grapes and cassava, and will serve as a valuable resource for researchers looking to increase crop production for food, those in biofuel development and scientists working on novel medicines.

Many of these strands of research require a comprehensive understanding of the enzymes, biochemical pathways and regulatory networks that control metabolism in plants. This is where the new databases will provide vital assistance, with detailed, genome-scale view of the chemical reactions taking place in plant cells documented for analysis.

The research was led by Carnegie staff scientist Sue Rhee, who managed a group of researchers who employed a number of approaches to generate the information. They integrated techniques and concepts from a wide range of fields including molecular sequence analysis, artificial intelligence, statistics, plant molecular biology, and plant biochemistry.

Dr. Rhee said:  “Wine grapes are an important crop for the state of California; corn and soybeans are the number one and two crops of the United States, both as a source of food and biofuel; cassava—also called manioc and yuca—is one of the most-common sources of food worldwide and a tremendously important crop for combating hunger.

“That’s why we decided to release the databases for these plants right away, even before we started preparing a manuscript describing this work, to help researchers get started in improving production and yield of these crucial crops.”

Posted by Ben Evans