Re-assessing Systems Biology Approaches on Analyzing Sulfate Metabolism

Mainly driven by the availability of the first Arabidopsis genome sequence in 2000 a rapid development of high throughput analytical techniques were developed and termed transcriptomics. This development was quickly followed by developing metabolite-profiling technologies, metabolomics. The ever-growing data bases made the development of new biostatistical and bioinformatics tools necessary. These ‘omics’ approaches were also applied to analyze the response of plants towards sulfate deprivation with the aim to gain a more complete, holistic view on plant metabolism and its control in response to varied nutrient supply. Early results though already providing novel results and fostering new routes of investigation were hampered by the incomplete annotation of the genes of the Arabidopsis genome. In recent years this informational gap was largely filled. Thus, we revisit here one old data set obtained at the infancy of ‘omics’ research and indicate novel conclusions possible when re-assessing these data as well as indicate new possibilities of continued analyses.