Collection
Multi-Author (Forum) Review “Plant Systems Biology”
Plant systems biology is a rapidly evolving field looking at various aspects of plant development and interaction with the environment, using modern genetics, genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and bioinformatics approaches.
The team of Paul Dijkwel focuses on the systems biology of plant ageing. They regard aging as a highly coordinated and intricate process that starts already with the birth of the plant. In their work, they summarize the known molecular genetics and multi-omics approaches used to study plant ageing recently. Furthermore, they present a model in which primary metabolic processes drive plant ageing.
Prof. Bartels and co-authors investigate the systems biology of resurrection species. They present a comprehensive review on the transcriptomic reprogramming and metabolomic rearrangements in resurrection species during desiccation and subsequent rehydration.
The team of Zoran Nikoloski reviews constrained based approaches that integrate genetic variants, such as SNPs, in metabolic models to characterise their effects on reaction fluxes in model and crop plants. Furthermore, they provide a roadmap for future research on metabolic modelling in crops.
The review of Saleh Alseekh, Alisdair Fernie, and co-authors is dedicated to the Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in plants. The authors provide reviews on many cases studies abiotic and biotic stress tolerance, yield associated traits, and metabolic composition. They also outline the strategies for gene validation and functional studies.
Finally, the team of Milen Georgiev reviews the available platforms for metabolomics analysis based on mass spectrometry coupled with separation by gas or liquid chropatography (GC-MS or LC-MS) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Next to the metabolite platforms, the team of Dr. Georgiev reviews the advances in metabolic profiling of nutritional crops and medicinal plants, as well as the human biofluids profiling in health and disease: two research avenues that have attracted huge interest recently.
Overall, the collection of articles in this forum review is of interest to a broad readership of plant systems biologists and may inspire new ideas for plant research in the reviewed fields.
Editors
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Assoc. Prof. Dr. Tsanko Gechev
Dr. Tsanko Gechev is the Director of the Center of Plant Systems Biology and Biotechnology in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and Associate Professor at the University of Plovdiv. Dr. Gechev has degrees in Plant Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. His research is focused on reactive oxygen species as modulators of plant stress responses and programmed cell death, plant ageing, and desiccation tolerance in resurrection species. In 2017, he won the Pythagoras prize by the Ministry of Education and Science of Bulgaria. Dr. Gechev is a member of FEBS and Editor of the journals Planta and International Journal of Molecular Sciences.
Articles (6 in this collection)
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Metabolomics and health: from nutritional crops and plant-based pharmaceuticals to profiling of human biofluids
Authors (first, second and last of 6)
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Genome-wide association studies: assessing trait characteristics in model and crop plants
Authors (first, second and last of 4)
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Characterization of effects of genetic variants via genome-scale metabolic modelling
Authors (first, second and last of 4)
