van Baarlen Peter, van Esse H Peter, Siezen Roland J, Thomma Bart P H J
Nijmegen Centre for Molecular Life Sciences, UMC Radboud University, Geert Grooteplein 26-28, 6525 GA Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Trends Plant Sci. 2008 Jan;13(1):44-50. doi: 10.1016/j.tplants.2007.11.003. Epub 2007 Dec 21.
Microarrays are used to profile transcriptional activity, providing global cell biology insight. Particularly for plants, interpretation of transcriptional profiles is challenging because many genes have unknown functions. Furthermore, many plant gene sequences do not have clear homologs in other model organisms. Fortunately, over the past five years, various tools that assist plant scientists have been developed. Here, we evaluate the currently available in silico tools for reconstruction of cellular (metabolic, biochemical and signal transduction) pathways based on plant gene expression datasets. Furthermore, we show how expression-profile comparison at the level of these various cellular pathways contributes to the postulation of novel hypotheses which, after experimental verification, can provide further insight into decisive elements that have roles in cellular processes.
微阵列用于分析转录活性，提供全面的细胞生物学见解。特别是对于植物，转录谱的解读具有挑战性，因为许多基因的功能未知。此外，许多植物基因序列在其他模式生物中没有明确的同源物。幸运的是，在过去五年中，已经开发出了各种辅助植物科学家的工具。在这里，我们评估了基于植物基因表达数据集重建细胞（代谢、生化和信号转导）途径的现有计算机工具。此外，我们展示了在这些不同细胞途径水平上的表达谱比较如何有助于提出新的假设，经过实验验证后，这些假设可以进一步深入了解在细胞过程中起作用的决定性因素。
