Author(s)

Kar Satismruti, Natesan Senthil, Sampathrajan Vellaikumar, Rajagopalan Veera Ranjani, Muthurajan Raveendran

Department of Plant Biotechnology, Center for Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, India.
Department of Plant Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics, Center for Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, India.

In the present era of genomics, ionomics is one of the major pillars for the structural and functional genomic study. The complete set of ions present in an organism is referred to as the ionome of the organism. Hence, the ionomics is defined as the, “study of quantitative complement of low molecular weight molecules present in cells in a particular physiological and developmental state of the plant” [1]. The complete ionomic profiling of the plants are done by using a number of analytical tools like ICP-MS, ICP-OES, X-Ray crystallography, Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) etc. All these analytical tools gave complete profile of the ions present in the plants. These data are stored in a database called PiiMS (Purdue Ionomics Information Management System) [2]. The huge data available in the database helps in the forward and reverse genetic approach for studying the structural and functional genomics of the particular organism. This review describes the role of the ionomic study in crop plants like arabidopsis, rice and maize.

DNA Microarray; Functional Genomics; Ions; Ionome; Ionomics; Mineral Nutrition

K. Satismruti, N. Senthil, S. Vellaikumar, R. Ranjani and M. Raveendran, "Plant Ionomics: A Platform for Identifying Novel Gene Regulating Plant Mineral Nutrition," American Journal of Plant Sciences, Vol. 4 No. 7, 2013, pp. 1309-1315. doi: 10.4236/ajps.2013.47162.