www.checkbiotech.org ; www.czu.cz ; www.raupp.info

The variation in the biochemical composition of plants is to a large extent
determined by their hereditary characteristics. This is the conclusion of a
publication by Wageningen UR researchers appearing in Nature Genetics- on
line June 2006.

The study brought together researchers from the Wageningen UR departments
Wageningen University, Plant Research International and RIKILT - in a joint
project within the research programme of the NGI Centre for BioSystems
Genomics - and the state university of Groningen.

The findings make clear that plant breeders will be able to use
crossbreeding to develop new plant varieties faster in the future, thanks to
a combination of large-scale analyses of content substances, knowledge of
the genetic background of plants and use of bioinformatics. Higher content
of health-promoting substances and improved taste are examples of traits
that could be bred for.

Until now, many scientists assumed that it would be extremely laborious to
study the direct contribution of genetic background to biochemical
composition. The influence of the environment on the composition of
metabolites (content substances) was expected to be too large for this.

The new research showed that the presence of metabolites is to a large
extent determined by the genetic composition of the plant. This was
demonstrated in a population of Arabidopsis plants by using fast and
extremely accurate equipment for analysing metabolites, good genetic maps
and powerful bioinformatics and statistics tools. The researchers found that
the hereditary characteristics played an important role for around 75% of
the hundreds of examined metabolites.

Due to this proven importance of the genomic natural variation and thanks to
recent technological developments, plant breeders will be able to use
targeted crossbreeding in their breeding programmes and select for the
desired metabolite composition already in the seedling stage. This makes it
possible to develop plants with more health-protecting substances, for
instance, or better taste, even if this involves multiple genes.

The researchers subsequently combined the results of different, related
metabolites. They found it relatively easy to confirm a number of previously
known biochemical pathways, and were able to clarify new steps within those
pathways.

The combination of metabolite analyses and genetic maps is expected to
become a key tool for the relatively young scientific field of system
biology.

[www.plantsciencesgroup.nl]

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