Regulation of metabolic networks: understanding metabolic complexity in the systems biology era.
Metabolism is one of the best recognised networks within biological systems, but our understanding of metabolic regulation has been limited by a failure to consider regulation within the context of the whole network. With recent advances in theoretical aspects of network thinking and a postgenomic landscape in which our ability to quantify molecular changes at a systems level is unsurpassed, the time is ripe for the development of a new level of understanding of the regulation of plant metabolic networks. Theoretical advances such as the formal description of 'scale-free' networks have provided explanations for network behaviour (such as robustness). In parallel, the appreciation of the importance of new levels of the metabolic regulatory hierarchy (such as protein-protein interaction) and the continuing development of global profiling technologies is generating a system-wide molecular data set of increasing resolution. In this review we will argue that the integration of these different aspects of metabolic research will bring about a step change in our understanding of the regulation of metabolic networks in plants.
Sweetlove
Lee J
LJ
Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3RB, UK. Lee.sweetlove@plants.ox.ac.uk
Fernie
Alisdair R
AR
D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D018506:Gene Expression Regulation, Plant; D010944:Plants / Q000378:metabolism*; D015398:Signal Transduction