Glucosinolates

Senior scientists involved: Barbara Ann Halkier, Alexander Schulz

Glucosinolates are characteristic of the cruciferous plants, which include the economically important Brassica vegetables as well as the model plant Arabidopsis. These compounds have high interest as cancer-preventive agents, biopesticides and flavor compounds. The availability of advanced bioinformatics and molecular tools for Arabidopsis combined with natural variation between ecotypes and extensive mutant collections available for Arabidopsis make the biosynthesis of glucosinolates a powerful model system for studying basically any plant specific processes. This has facilitated the identification of most of the biosynthetic genes as well as the first regulatory genes. Glucosinolate profiles have been modified by engineering biosynthetic genes into cruciferous plants, which enables studies on the functional role of the individual glucosinolates e.g. in insect interaction. Furthermore, the first transporter proteins capable of transporting glucosinolates have been identified. Technical breakthroughs in Arabidopsis such as global transcript profiling in 8 different ecotypes, co-expression databases based on over 2500 global microarray experiments, as well as eQTL analysis of two populations of recombinant inbred lines. These tools make it possible to gain biologicalinsights at the molecular level, which may enable us to e.g. move from empiric to predictable genetic engineering of biosynthetic pathways.