Multi-tissue to whole plant metabolic modelling

Area of Science:

• Plant Systems Biology
• Metabolic Engineering
• Computational Biology

Background:

• Genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) are established tools for analyzing plant metabolism.
• Previous GEM studies primarily focused on single tissues or species.
• There's a growing need to model metabolic interactions between different plant tissues and organs.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review the construction and application of multi-tissue genome-scale metabolic models in plants.
• To highlight the strengths and challenges associated with these integrated models.
• To explore the future integration of GEMs into multi-scale plant modeling frameworks.

Main Methods:

• Construction of multi-tissue GEMs for various plant species (e.g., Arabidopsis, barley, soybean, Setaria).
• Application of these models to investigate inter-organ metabolic dynamics.
• Review of existing literature on plant multi-tissue and whole-plant metabolic modeling.

Main Results:

• Multi-tissue GEMs enable the study of physiological processes like organ-specific growth and resource allocation.
• These models facilitate analysis of source-sink relationships and charge/proton balancing across plant structures.
• Successful construction and application demonstrated for key crop and model plant species.

Conclusions:

• Multi-tissue GEMs are powerful tools for dissecting complex plant physiological processes.
• Further development is needed to overcome current challenges and integrate models across scales.
• This approach holds significant potential for advancing plant science and agricultural applications.