基因芯片研究植物逆境基因表达新进展

Advances of microarray analysis on plant gene expression under environmental stresses

逆境胁迫影响植物的正常生长,导致作物减产,甚至绝收。提高作物的抗逆性一直是作物遗传育种学家追求的目标,大量研究也正试图揭示这一复杂的生物学机制。传统的从生理生化水平到单一基因的研究都难以揭示植物复杂的抗逆机制,而基因芯片(Gene chip)的应用使得这一目标成为了可能,基因芯片从整个转录水平入手,能够揭示大量基因的表达和调控情况,同时结合蛋白质组学和代谢组学的研究方法,将基因定位于代谢途径的某个位置,寻找逆境胁迫响应的关键基因,完善植物逆境胁迫响应的分子网络,为今后利用生物技术手段提高作物抗逆境胁迫能力提供依据。文章主要对近年来基因芯片在植物逆境胁迫基因表达研究中的进展进行了综述。

Different stressed conditions impair plant growth and further, cause great loss of crop yield and even lead to lose production completely. Increasing resistance/tolerance of crops under stressed conditions is a major goal of numerous plant breeders, and many elegant works are focusing on this area to uncover these complicated mechanisms underlying it. However, the traditional strategies including physiological and biochemical methods, as well as studies on a few genes, can not well understand the overall biological mechanism. Microarray analysis opens a door to uncover these cryptic mechanisms, and has the ability of detecting gene transcription and regulation at genomic level in different plant tissues. And works in association with related methods of proteomics and metabolomics. Therefore, it is possible to locate genes in certain key metabolism pathways. Through these procedures, it is also possible to look for critical genes in the pathway and to well understand the molecular mechanism of resistance/tolerance. These results can be as a guidance for increasing the resistance/tolerance of stressed conditions using biotechnology methods in future. This paper mainly focused on and discussed the advances of microarray analysis of stressed conditions-related genes in plants.