Laboratory of Plant Genetics-Sciences III, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Plant Biol (Stuttg). 2013 Nov;15(6):925-30. doi: 10.1111/plb.12075. Epub 2013 Aug 29.
The discovery of genes that can be used to increase plant tolerance to environmental stress has practical implications for agriculture, since knowledge at the molecular level can potentially be translated from model plants to crops or from tolerant to sensitive cultivars. For more than a decade, researchers have attempted to identify transcriptional and metabolic pathways involved in stress tolerance using functional genomics tools. In some cases, promising results were obtained when a clear causal link was found between transcripts and tolerance/sensitivity to stress. However, recent reports question the global translational power of functional genomics for biotechnological applications, as one of the main limitations seems to be the large variability in gene expression. Transcript-level variability under stress has not been considered of interest in the scientific literature because it is intuitively obvious, but most reports seem to naively overlook the consequences. Here, three case situations are reviewed (variability between genotypes, variability due to environmental interactions and variability between stressors) in support of the concept that inherent transcript-level variation in biological systems may limit our knowledge of environmental plant tolerance and of functional genomics in molecular stress physiology.
能够提高植物环境胁迫耐受性的基因的发现对农业具有实际意义，因为在分子水平上的知识可能会从模式植物转化为作物，或者从耐受品种转化为敏感品种。十多年来，研究人员一直试图使用功能基因组学工具来鉴定参与胁迫耐受的转录和代谢途径。在某些情况下，当发现转录本与对胁迫的耐受/敏感性之间存在明确的因果关系时，就会得到有希望的结果。然而，最近的报告质疑功能基因组学在生物技术应用中的全球翻译能力，因为主要的限制之一似乎是基因表达的巨大可变性。在科学文献中，应激下的转录本水平可变性并没有被认为是有趣的，因为这是直观明显的，但大多数报告似乎天真地忽略了其后果。在这里，综述了三种情况（基因型之间的变异性、环境相互作用引起的变异性和胁迫因素之间的变异性），以支持这样一种概念，即生物系统中固有的转录本水平变化可能限制了我们对环境植物耐受性和分子胁迫生理学中功能基因组学的认识。
