Combined Transcript and Metabolite Profiling of Arabidopsis Grown under Widely Variant Growth Conditions Facilitates the Identification of Novel Metabolite-Mediated Regulation of Gene Expression

Regulation of metabolism at the level of transcription and its corollary metabolite-mediated regulation of transcription are well-documented mechanisms by which plants adapt to circumstance. That said the function of only a minority of transcription factor networks are fully understood and it seems likely that we have only identified a subset of the metabolites that play a mediator function in the regulation of transcription. Here we describe an integrated genomics approach in which we perform combined transcript and metabolite profiling on Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) plants challenged by various environmental extremes. We chose this approach to generate a large variance in the levels of all parameters recorded. The data was then statistically evaluated to identify metabolites whose level robustly correlated with those of a particularly large number of transcripts. Since correlation alone provides no proof of causality we subsequently attempted to validate these putative mediators of gene expression via a combination of statistical analysis of data available in publicly available databases and iterative experimental evaluation. Data presented here suggest that, on adoption of appropriate caution, the approach can be used for the identification of metabolite mediators of gene expression. As an exemplary case study we document that in plants, as in yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and mammals, leucine plays an important role as a regulator of gene expression and provide a leucine response gene regulatory network.