Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
VIB Center for Plant Systems Biology, Ghent, Belgium.
Mol Syst Biol. 2020 Dec;16(12):e9667. doi: 10.15252/msb.20209667.
Most of our current knowledge on plant molecular biology is based on experiments in controlled laboratory environments. However, translating this knowledge from the laboratory to the field is often not straightforward, in part because field growth conditions are very different from laboratory conditions. Here, we test a new experimental design to unravel the molecular wiring of plants and study gene-phenotype relationships directly in the field. We molecularly profiled a set of individual maize plants of the same inbred background grown in the same field and used the resulting data to predict the phenotypes of individual plants and the function of maize genes. We show that the field transcriptomes of individual plants contain as much information on maize gene function as traditional laboratory-generated transcriptomes of pooled plant samples subject to controlled perturbations. Moreover, we show that field-generated transcriptome and metabolome data can be used to quantitatively predict individual plant phenotypes. Our results show that profiling individual plants in the field is a promising experimental design that could help narrow the lab-field gap.
我们目前关于植物分子生物学的大部分知识都是基于在受控实验室环境中进行的实验。然而，将这些知识从实验室转化到野外并不总是那么直接，部分原因是野外生长条件与实验室条件有很大的不同。在这里，我们测试了一种新的实验设计，旨在直接在野外揭示植物的分子连接，并研究基因-表型关系。我们对同一自交系背景下在同一田间生长的一组个体玉米植株进行了分子分析，并利用所得数据预测个体植株的表型和玉米基因的功能。我们表明，个体植株的田间转录组包含与传统受控扰动下的混合植物样本的实验室生成转录组一样多的有关玉米基因功能的信息。此外，我们还表明，可以使用田间生成的转录组和代谢组数据来定量预测个体植物的表型。我们的结果表明，在田间对个体植株进行分析是一种很有前途的实验设计，它可以帮助缩小实验室与野外之间的差距。
