Looking for invisible phenotypes in cell wall mutants of Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract

Thousands of gene products are required to construct plant cell walls. The collection of insertional mutants in Arabidopsis thaliana provides a resource to begin functional analysis of these gene products using genetically defined materials. Infrared spectroscopy combined with linear and non-linear algorithms for multivariate analysis provides a tool to probe cell wall phenotypes at the molecular level, whether or not plants display a visible phenotype.

Keywords:

• cell walls
• chemometrics
• Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy
• genomics
• mutants

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the staff involved in our NSF plant genome research project—C. Musser, A. Olek, J. Tewari, M. Held; to the undergraduate students involved in infrared screening; and to our colleagues at Purdue (W. Vermerris and C. Staiger) and at Universities of Wisconsin (T. Bleecker, R. O'Malley, S. Patterson), Florida (K. Koch, D. McCarty) and Connecticut (X. Li, B. Link, W.-D. Reiter) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (S. Thomas).