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Plant Physiology 136:2451-2456 (2004) © 2004 American Society of Plant Biologists Update on Plant Ionomics1Center for Plant Environmental Stress Physiology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907
Living systems are supported and sustained by the genome through the action of the transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, and ionome, the four basic biochemical pillars of functional genomics. These pillars represent the sum of all the expressed genes, proteins, metabolites, and elements within an organism. The dynamic response and interaction of these biochemical "omes" defines how a living system functions, and its study, systems biology, is now one of the biggest challenges in the life sciences. Studies on the functional connections between the genome and the transcriptome (Martzivanou and Hampp, 2003
Lahner and colleagues first described the ionome to include all the metals, metalloids, and nonmetals present in an organism (Lahner et al., 2003
Remarkable progress has been made in describing and understanding the basic biology of nutrient ion homeostasis in plants since its establishment as a scientific disciple in the 19th century (Marschner, 1995
Progress in our understanding of plant mineral nutrition has been closely related to the development of chemical quantification methods and availability of pure reagents. This relationship is clearly reflected in the timeline of discovery for the essentiality of various micronutrients in plants from iron in 1860 to nickel in 1987. More recent developments in parallel and massively parallel analytical techniques have played a critical role in the explosive development of genomic biology. The advent of DNA microarray technology has certainly accelerated the pace at which genes regulated by ionic changes can be identified. Not surprisingly, many genes are transcriptionally responsive to changes in nutrient availability, including transporters, transcription factors, and signaling factors (Thimm et al., 2001
For comparative ionomics on a genome-wide scale, wild-type and mutant plants are ideally grown side-by-side under identical conditions, in a uniform growth media. They all grow to the same size and are harvested at the same time, sampling equivalent amounts and parts of tissue in every case. They are grown and harvested under clean room conditions, using tools that won't impart any measured elements to the samples, washed of any surface contaminants, dried, weighed, and analyzed accurately and precisely. The data are processed efficiently, summarized in an easily understood format, and made widely accessible. However, in the imperfect world, a screen of a significant portion of the genome takes months or years. Conditions change, personnel change. Samples get contaminated with growth media, growth media varies from batch to batch. Plants grown on soil are under- or overwatered. Sample sizes vary and include different tissues from different plants. Instruments vary with the maintenance cycle and operating conditions. Data are mixed up, lost, or misinterpreted, and programs have bugs. The success or failure of such an ionomic project is determined by which of these two scenarios we stand closer to. Within these boundaries lies another dimension to consider: sample throughput versus the quality and breadth of the data collected. The best approach to this key tradeoff is by no mean universally agreed upon. Nearer to one end of this dimension lie scientists such as Sydney Brenner, who feel that "...data that goes into a database should be complete, accurate and permanent, so you never have to do it again" (Duncan, 2004
For ionomic analysis samples are typically digested in concentrated acid and diluted before analyzing. Nitric acid digests most plant material easily and, of the common inorganic acids, interferes with ICP-MS analysis the least. Open-air digestion below the boiling point works well, while microwave digestion is becoming more common, especially where loss of an analyte of interest is a concern. Digestion time is much shorter under the higher pressure and temperatures of the microwave digestion apparatus; however, capacity issues shift the overall speed equation toward open-air digestion, where several hundred samples can be run in the same hood that would vent the microwave, and with far less sample handling. The three most common methods for elemental analysis are atomic absorption spectroscopy, ICP-optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES), and ICP-MS. Atomic absorption spectroscopy quantitates one element at a time or a few elements in rapid succession. This method is very well established and quite precise, but not nearly as sensitive as ICP-MS and with a dynamic range of only 3 or 4 orders of magnitude. ICP-OES, often referred to as simply ICP, is less sensitive than ICP-MS; however, some of this sensitivity is won back by the robustness of ICP in more concentrated matrices. ICP is a reasonable choice for an ionomics screen, at the possible expense of some of the trace elements due to its lower sensitivity. Both ICP and ICP-MS can measure multiple elements essentially simultaneously in the same sample, a very important property in an ionomics project. One critical advantage of ICP-MS is that it allows for a smaller sample size due to its greater sensitivity, making nondestructive sampling of small plants possible, a prerequisite in a random forward genetic screeninteresting mutants need to be saved not destroyed by the ICP. ICP-MS also has a dynamic range of 6 or 7 orders of magnitude, making it possible to simultaneously measure both macronutrients and micronutrient concentrations in the same sample. Effective genome-scale ionomics requires that many thousands of plant samples will need to be grown, harvested, dried, weighed, digested, and analyzed over long periods of time. Such an effort means that hundreds of samples will need to be processed in a consistent manner, weekly, for several years. Such an effort continuously generates thousands of pieces of data, and the final critical task in ionomics is data handling, including everything from getting the data off the analytical instrument, through date tracking, data storage, data processing, analyses, and publication. Analysis of raw data generated in an ionomics project can be carried out in a number of valid ways. The key objective is identification of plants with disturbed ionomes. This goal does not require that actual concentrations of any of the elements be determined. Instead, interesting mutants can be identified by their overall elemental profiles using average signal normalization and various supervised and unsupervised clustering systems such as discriminant analysis, principle component analysis, and neural net trolling. Clearly, an efficient and robust process containing all these components needs to be designed and implemented before any successful ionomic project can be performed (Lahner et al., 2003
By considering the ionome as a whole, the concept of ion homeostasis networks arises, in which various ions within an organism are coordinately regulated. The observation that only 11% of the 50 Arabidopsis ion-profile mutants recently identified (Lahner et al., 2003
Achieving high-throughput ICP-MS analysis at the high precision needed to produce a viable screen of the ionome is challenging and requires both good analytical techniques and data handling. We have performed such a screen on shoot tissue from an Arabidopsis FN mutagenized population of approximately 6,000 M2 plants and identified 51 mutants with altered shoot ionomes (Lahner et al., 2003
The availability of Arabidopsis high-density gene arrays now makes it possible to simultaneously genotype plants for several hundred thousand loci. By using total genomic DNA instead of mRNA for hybridization and pooling DNA from only 15 homozygous recombinants displaying the mutant phenotype, it is possible to map a locus to approximately 12 cM (Borevitz et al., 2003
As an alternative to laboratory-induced mutations, genetic variation occurring among and within natural populations of Arabidopsis can be used (Alonso-Blanco and Koornneef, 2000
An alternative to the forward genetic approach described is the opposite strategy of starting with a mutation in a known gene and asking the question, "Does this mutation have an ionomic phenotype?" Such an approach switches the focus from one of high-throughput screening and mapping to an approach that requires in-depth biochemical and physiological analyses of the mutant. A close-to-saturation collection of Arabidopsis T-DNA insertional mutants with sequenced boarders is curated at the Salk Institute Genomic Analysis Laboratory (SIGnAL), making this approach attractive in Arabidopsis. High-throughput screening for induced point mutations (TILLING) also makes it possible to identify alternative alleles in genes of interest in numerous species, including maize (Zea mays), black cottonwood (Populus balsamifera subsp. trichocarpa), Brassica oleracea, and Lotus japonicus. The use of genomic DNA pooling and PCR also makes the identification of mutants in specific genes possible in other species using fast neutron deletion mutagenesis (Li et al., 2001
To date, ionomics has been applied to bulk tissue samples. Such analyses only provide a very limited view of the tissue, and cellular and subcellular complexities of ion homeostasis mechanisms. The ability to profile the elemental content of different plant tissues such as meristematic and vascular tissue requires a 10- to 50-µm spatial sampling resolution. Such imaging has been achieved in vivo for individual elements such as selenium in plants using x-ray spectroscopy (Pickering et al., 2000
To maximize the value of any large-scale genomics effort, it is critical that the data be made available to as wide a selection of people as possible. To facilitate such a process, we have developed a searchable online database containing ionomic information on more than 22,000 plants. The database can be searched for fast neutron mutagenized mutants altered in a specific or set of elements, as well as on gene name and AGI gene codes for reverse genetics in T-DNA insertional lines. This ionomics database can be found at http://hort.agriculture.purdue.edu/Ionomics/database.asp. Ionomic mutants reported by Lahner et al. (2003)
The development of ionomics as a functional genomics approach has been supported in part by the NSF Plant Functional Genomics program (0077378DBI) through a collaborative grant to Mary Lou Guerinot, David Eide, Jeff Harper, David E. Salt, Julian Schroeder, and John Ward. We also thank Brett Lahner for his insightful and sustained input on the design, implementation, and running of our ionomics system at Purdue and help with the content of this update. Received June 7, 2004; returned for revision July 9, 2004; accepted July 12, 2004.
1 This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Plant Functional Genomics program (grant no. 0077378DBI). www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/doi/10.1104/pp.104.047753. * E-mail dsalt{at}purdue.edu; fax 7654940391.
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