Minisymposium 7: Emerging Technologies
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M0702: Exploring Chemical Space in the Plant World
Bioactive chemicals have a long history of helping plant scientists unravel physiological mechanisms. These include inhibitors of GA biosynthesis, ethylene action, and auxin transport, cytoskeleton-disrupting drugs, and inhibitors of GDP-GTP exchange proteins. However, this approach has also met with criticism due to the complexities associated with understanding the action mode of compounds at the molecular level. While over ten million compounds are known in chemical literature, the potential unique chemical structures composed of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, phosphorous, and the halogens of molecular weight <1000 likely exceeds 1060. The compounds that have been tested for effects on plants are therefore only a fraction of the structural possibilities. The development of combinatorial and automated techniques for synthesizing novel compounds has significantly enhanced the productivity of chemists and increases the likelihood of synthesizing molecular libraries representative of chemical space. Once chemicals are identified, we can combine their use with genetic screens to identify genes involved in the same process. The use of unbiased libraries of diverse small molecules will allow plant biologists to discover numerous new bioactive molecules valuable for studying the function of uncharacterized plant genes. Chemical genomics is powerful for analyzing regulatory networks underlying a specific process. The chemical genomics approach can address loss-of-function lethality and gene redundancy and allow instantaneous, reversible, tunable, and conditional control of a phenotype. Well-characterized bioactive chemicals and their targets identified in Arabidopsis can be used in non-model species to improve agronomic traits and increase crop value.
