Metabolomics based annotation of novel genes in Arabidopsis thaliana

Of the approximately 30,000 genes that are predicted to be in the Arabidopsis genome, the function of a large proportion is experimentally undetermined. The NSF Arabidopsis 2010 program has supported the development of community resources to identify the functions of these genes. As part of this effort, a consortium of metabolomics laboratories has been established to generate and evaluate metabolomics data as a tool for generating hypotheses concerning the metabolic and physiological function of genes of unknown function. In combination, this consortium has the ability to evaluate the relative abundance of nearly 2,000 Arabidopsis metabolites. This consortium is combining reverse genetics and metabolomics to evaluate the consequence of loss-of-function mutations on the Arabidopsis metabolome and provide information to formulate initial hypotheses about genes of unknown function that can be further explored by the research community