Noutsos Christos, Perera Ann M, Nikolau Basil J, Seaver Samuel M D, Ware Doreen H
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, United States of America.
W.M. Keck Metabolomics Research Laboratory, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2015 May 1;10(5):e0124501. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0124501. eCollection 2015.
To date, variation in nectar chemistry of flowering plants has not been studied in detail. Such variation exerts considerable influence on pollinator-plant interactions, as well as on flower traits that play important roles in the selection of a plant for visitation by specific pollinators. Over the past 60 years the Aquilegia genus has been used as a key model for speciation studies. In this study, we defined the metabolomic profiles of flower samples of two Aquilegia species, A. Canadensis and A. pubescens. We identified a total of 75 metabolites that were classified into six main categories: organic acids, fatty acids, amino acids, esters, sugars, and unknowns. The mean abundances of 25 of these metabolites were significantly different between the two species, providing insights into interspecies variation in floral chemistry. Using the PlantSEED biochemistry database, we found that the majority of these metabolites are involved in biosynthetic pathways. Finally, we explored the annotated genome of A. coerulea, using the PlantSEED pipeline and reconstructed the metabolic network of Aquilegia. This network, which contains the metabolic pathways involved in generating the observed chemical variation, is now publicly available from the DOE Systems Biology Knowledge Base (KBase; http://kbase.us).
迄今为止，开花植物花蜜化学成分的变异尚未得到详细研究。这种变异对传粉者与植物的相互作用以及花朵性状有着相当大的影响，而花朵性状在特定传粉者选择拜访的植物中起着重要作用。在过去的60年里，耧斗菜属一直被用作物种形成研究的关键模型。在本研究中，我们定义了两种耧斗菜属植物——加拿大耧斗菜和柔毛耧斗菜花朵样本的代谢组学图谱。我们总共鉴定出75种代谢物，它们被分为六大类：有机酸、脂肪酸、氨基酸、酯类、糖类和未知物。这两种植物中25种代谢物的平均丰度存在显著差异，为花部化学的种间变异提供了见解。利用植物种子生物化学数据库，我们发现这些代谢物中的大多数都参与了生物合成途径。最后，我们使用植物种子管道探索了蓝花耧斗菜的注释基因组，并重建了耧斗菜属的代谢网络。这个包含产生观察到的化学变异所涉及代谢途径的网络，现在可从美国能源部系统生物学知识库（KBase；http://kbase.us）公开获取。
