Summary: The notion that plants use specialized metabolism to protect against environmental stresses needs to be experimentally proven by addressing the question of whether stress tolerance by specialized metabolism is directly due to metabolites such as flavonoids. We report that flavonoids with radical scavenging activity mitigate against oxidative and drought stress in Arabidopsis thaliana. Metabolome and transcriptome profiling and experiments with oxidative and drought stress in wild‐type, single overexpressors of MYB12/PFG1 (PRODUCTION OF FLAVONOL GLYCOSIDES1) or MYB75/PAP1 (PRODUCTION OF ANTHOCYANIN PIGMENT1), double overexpressors of MYB12 and PAP1, transparent testa4 (tt4) as a flavonoid‐deficient mutant, and flavonoid‐deficient MYB12 or PAP1 overexpressing lines (obtained by crossing tt4 and the individual MYB overexpressor) demonstrated that flavonoid overaccumulation was key to enhanced tolerance to such stresses. Antioxidative activity assays using 2,2‐diphenyl‐1‐picrylhydrazyl, methyl viologen, and 3,3′‐diaminobenzidine clearly showed that anthocyanin overaccumulation with strong in vitro antioxidative activity mitigated the accumulation of reactive oxygen species in vivo under oxidative and drought stress. These data confirm the usefulness of flavonoids for enhancing both biotic and abiotic stress tolerance in crops.

Summary: The integration of metabolomics and transcriptomics can provide precise information on gene‐to‐metabolite networks for identifying the function of unknown genes unless there has been a post‐transcriptional modification. Here, we report a comprehensive analysis of the metabolome and transcriptome of Arabidopsis thaliana over‐expressing the PAP1 gene encoding an MYB transcription factor, for the identification of novel gene functions involved in flavonoid biosynthesis. For metabolome analysis, we performed flavonoid‐targeted analysis by high‐performance liquid chromatography‐mass spectrometry and non‐targeted analysis by Fourier‐transform ion‐cyclotron mass spectrometry with an ultrahigh‐resolution capacity. This combined analysis revealed the specific accumulation of cyanidin and quercetin derivatives, and identified eight novel anthocyanins from an array of putative 1800 metabolites in PAP1 over‐expressing plants. The transcriptome analysis of 22 810 genes on a DNA microarray revealed the induction of 38 genes by ectopic PAP1 over‐expression. In addition to well‐known genes involved in anthocyanin production, several genes with unidentified functions or annotated with putative functions, encoding putative glycosyltransferase, acyltransferase, glutathione S‐transferase, sugar transporters and transcription factors, were induced by PAP1. Two putative glycosyltransferase genes (At5g17050 and At4g14090) induced by PAP1 expression were confirmed to encode flavonoid 3‐O‐glucosyltransferase and anthocyanin 5‐O‐glucosyltransferase, respectively, from the enzymatic activity of their recombinant proteins in vitro and results of the analysis of anthocyanins in the respective T‐DNA‐inserted mutants. The functional genomics approach through the integration of metabolomics and transcriptomics presented here provides an innovative means of identifying novel gene functions involved in plant metabolism.

A database (DB) describing the relationships between species and their metabolites would be useful for metabolomics research, because it targets systematic analysis of enormous numbers of organic compounds with known or unknown structures in metabolomics. We constructed an extensive species–metabolite DB for plants, the KNApSAcK Core DB, which contains 101,500 species–metabolite relationships encompassing 20,741 species and 50,048 metabolites. We also developed a search engine within the KNApSAcK Core DB for use in metabolomics research, making it possible to search for metabolites based on an accurate mass, molecular formula, metabolite name or mass spectra in several ionization modes. We also have developed databases for retrieving metabolites related to plants used for a range of purposes. In our multifaceted plant usage DB, medicinal/edible plants are related to the geographic zones (GZs) where the plants are used, their biological activities, and formulae of Japanese and Indonesian traditional medicines (Kampo and Jamu, respectively). These data are connected to the species–metabolites relationship DB within the KNApSAcK Core DB, keyed via the species names. All databases can be accessed via the website http://kanaya.naist.jp/KNApSAcK_Family/. KNApSAcK WorldMap DB comprises 41,548 GZ–plant pair entries, including 222 GZs and 15,240 medicinal/edible plants. The KAMPO DB consists of 336 formulae encompassing 278 medicinal plants; the JAMU DB consists of 5,310 formulae encompassing 550 medicinal plants. The Biological Activity DB consists of 2,418 biological activities and 33,706 pairwise relationships between medicinal plants and their biological activities. Current statistics of the binary relationships between individual databases were characterized by the degree distribution analysis, leading to a prediction of at least 1,060,000 metabolites within all plants. In the future, the study of metabolomics will need to take this huge number of metabolites into consideration.

Covering: 1997 to early 2002 This review describes biochemistry, molecular biology and regulation of anthocyanin biosynthesis, with particular emphasis on mechanistic features and late steps of anthocyanin biosynthesis including glycosylation and vacuolar sequestration. The literature from 1997 to the beginning of 2002 is reviewed, and 163 references are cited.

Proton/sulfate cotransporters in the plasma membranes are responsible for uptake of the environmental sulfate used in the sulfate assimilation pathway in plants. Here we report the cloning and characterization of an Arabidopsis thaliana gene, AST68 , a new member of the sulfate transporter gene family in higher plants. Sequence analysis of cDNA and genomic clones of AST68 revealed that the AST68 gene is composed of 10 exons encoding a 677-aa polypeptide (74.1 kDa) that is able to functionally complement a Saccharomyces cerevisiae mutant lacking a sulfate transporter gene. Southern hybridization and restriction fragment length polymorphism mapping confirmed that AST68 is a single-copy gene that maps to the top arm of chromosome 5. Northern hybridization analysis of sulfate-starved plants indicated that the steady-state mRNA abundance of AST68 increased specifically in roots up to 9-fold by sulfate starvation. In situ hybridization experiments revealed that AST68 transcripts were accumulated in the central cylinder of sulfate-starved roots, but not in the xylem, endodermis, cortex, and epidermis. Among all the structural genes for sulfate assimilation, sulfate transporter ( AST68 ), APS reductase ( APR1 ), and serine acetyltransferase ( SAT1 ) were inducible by sulfate starvation in A. thaliana . The sulfate transporter ( AST68 ) exhibited the most intensive and specific response in roots, indicating that AST68 plays a central role in the regulation of sulfate assimilation in plants.