Isotopic Labeling Approaches for Exploring Plant Metabolism Dynamics

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About this Research Topic

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Background

World population growth is pressuring plant scientists, breeders, and farmers to find ways of increasing crop yield to meet the rising demand for food and other important resources, all while reducing chemical input to the crops. The next-generation crops will also have to maintain their biomass and seed yields in the face of climate change and the increasing incidence of extreme weather events. In this context, understanding plant metabolism - the basis of biomass and defense response - is at the core of next-generation breeding strategies to obtain climate-resilient crops. Describing the metabolic plasticity of photosynthesizing organisms and understanding its role in core biological processes and abiotic stress tolerance/resilience remains crucial to this end.

These issues can be readily addressed by quantifying the activity of individual metabolic reactions and pathways via metabolic flux analysis. This can be achieved by integrating data from isotopic labeling approaches which monitor the propagation of labeled nutrients (e.g. 13CO2, 15NH4) through metabolic pathways. Coupled with analyses of differential flux behavior, such approaches can introduce new targets for improving crop resilience.
This Research Topic focuses on studies that use dynamic isotopic labeling approaches to (i) test specific hypotheses about the activity of particular metabolic pathways in plants and other eukaryotic photosynthesizing organisms; (ii) quantify and compare reaction fluxes under different growth scenarios; and (iii) link reaction fluxes with other omics data to understand the factors affecting flux redistribution in photosynthesizing organisms exposed to suboptimal environments.

We strongly encourage Original Research articles employing stable isotope labeling approaches (e.g. 13C, 15N) to investigate the metabolism of photosynthesizing organisms, and/or computational modeling approaches that make use of these data. We also welcome articles reporting technological and/or methodological improvements for metabolic flux analysis of plant metabolism. Review articles are welcomed, provided they bring a new systematic and/or critical contribution to the field of metabolic flux analysis in photosynthesizing organisms, as well as lessons learned from other systems that may be applied in this setting.

Keywords: isotope labeling analysis, plant metabolism, modeling, metabolic fluxes, fluxomic, resource allocation, abiotic stress

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