Functional annotation of the Arabidopsis P450 superfamily based on large-scale co-expression analysis

Cytochrome P450 mono-oxygenases play prominent roles in a diverse set of metabolic pathways, but the function of most of these enzymes remains obscure. A bottleneck in the functional genomics of this superfamily constitutes hypothesis generation to identify potential substrates (or substrate classes) individual P450s may act on. We used publicly available large-scale expression data to perform co-expression analysis comparing the expression matrix of each P450 with those from more than 4000 selected genes across thousands of microarrays. Based on functional annotations of co-expressed genes from a diverse set of databases, co-expressed pathways were thus identified for each P450. Using this approach, most P450s with known functions were placed into their respective pathways, thereby proofing the concept. As examples, pathway mapping results identifying novel P450s potentially acting on flower-specific monoterpenes and root-specific triterpenes are described. Co-expression results for all Arabidopsis P450s will be presented as a web resource on the ‘CYPedia’ web pages (http://ibmp.u-strasbg.fr/~CYPedia/).