NSF Project #0109732:
Integrated Functional Genomics of Natural Products

Official NSF Project Site

Description of the NSF project award

Medicago truncatula is a close relative of the world's most important forage legume, alfalfa (Medicago sativa). It is a rich source of natural products, such as flavonoids, isoflavonoids and triterpenes, which impact its properties as a forage legume. The main experimental approach of this project is to perturb the expression of these natural products, and other areas of metabolism, by exposing cell cultures to biotic and abiotic elicitors.

Use of cell suspension cultures will allow sufficient material to be collected and analyzed in parallel. Three experimental conditions have been chosen that mimic natural environmental challenges. The ultimate goal of this project is to generate a truly functional genomics data set for control and elicited cell cultures. Such data will encompass expressed sequence information and the associated mRNA, protein and metabolite identities and concentrations.

This project will produce a variety of data so it becomes imperative to establish integrative models and software to facilitate relational analysis of the data to each other and to previous knowledge on sequences and pathways. Software is a facilitator of the discovery process when it enables the user to "navigate" the biological data in a dynamic and transparent way, requiring only the most basic computational skills.

The bioinformatics component of this project will:
   i) construct a relational database to store all data;
   ii) construct an expandable analysis server that will facilitate processing the data with several statistical and numerical algorithms; and
   iii) integrate the above components through a web interface.

The data as well as the software will be made available publicly. The data generated by this project will be used to construct a quantitative predictive model of the time courses after elicitation, which is required to interpret the regulation of the underlying complex biological processes. The data will provide information about the extent and nature of gene expression reprogramming in response to biotic and abiotic signals at the transcription, translation and metabolic levels. There will also be practical applications in directed gene discovery for important agronomic traits involving plant natural products. Finally, this project will make available to the scientific community a bioinformatics system capable of supporting functional genomics ranging from the transcriptome to the metabolome.

This project is funded by the NSF Plant Genome Research Program Award (#0109732). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.