The Use of Microarrays to Study the Anaerobic Response in Arabidopsis

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: The use of microarrays to characterize the transcript profile of Arabidopsis under various experimental conditions is rapidly expanding. This technique provides a huge amount of expression data, requiring bioinformatics tools to allow the proposal of working hypotheses. The aim of this study was to test the usefulness of this approach to examine the anaerobic response of Arabidopsis by evaluating the reliability of microarray data sets and by interrogation of microarray databases for the expression data of a set of anoxia-inducible genes. METHODS: User-driven software tools that display large gene expression datasets onto diagrams of metabolic pathways were used. The Genevestigator software was used to explore the expression of anoxia-inducible genes throughout the life cycle of Arabidopsis as well as relative to plant organs. T-DNA tagged mutants for selected genes identified from our microarray analysis were searched in the Arabidopsis thaliana Insertion Database, looking for insertional mutants from the Salk collection. KEY RESULTS: The results indicate that microarray data can provide the basis for new hypotheses in the field of plant responses to anaerobiosis and also provide knowledge for a targeted screening of Arabidopsis mutants. CONCLUSIONS: Research on plant responses to anaerobiosis can enormously benefit from the microarray technology.