Toward genome-wide metabolotyping and elucidation of metabolic system: metabolic profiling of large-scale bioresources.

An improvement in plant production is increasingly important for a sustainable human society. For this purpose, understanding the mechanism of plant production, that is, the plant metabolic system, is an immediate necessity. After the sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome, it has become possible to obtain a bird's eye view of its metabolism by means of omics such as transcriptomics and proteomics. Availability of thousands of transcriptome data points in the public domain has resulted in great advances in the methodology of functional genomics. Metabolome data can be a "gold mine" of biological findings. However, as the total throughput of metabolomics is far lower than that of transcriptomics due to technical difficulties, there is currently no publicly available large-scale metabolome dataset that is comparable in size to the transcriptome dataset. Recently, we established a novel methodology, termed widely targeted metabolomics, which can generate thousands of metabolome data points in a high-throughput manner. We previously conducted a targeted metabolite analysis of large-scale Arabidopsis bioresources, namely transposon-tagged mutants and accessions, to make a smaller dataset of metabolite accumulation. In this paper, we release approximately 3,000 metabolic profiles obtained by targeted analysis for 36 metabolites and discuss the possible regulation of amino acid accumulation.