Using the MapMan ontology to decipher diurnal regulation across species

The MapMan ontology was specifically tailored to be able to display plant responses on pathway diagrams and to statistically assess “omics” data. To this aim, only one biological term is assigned to a gene where this is biologically sensible. The ontology is specifically strong in the area of metabolism where it also caters for major metabolites. This allows displaying large overview diagrams of species agnostic “omics” data across multiple different experiments.

Here we present a use case where we investigated the diurnal response and an extension of the night leading to carbon starvation in maize, Arabidopsis and tomato. We were able to show that especially for comparisons between the monocot and the dicots on an individual gene level there was not much concordance, however using ontology classes especially for the extended night more similarities emerged. We could also show that using the MapMan ontology differences in regulation likely triggered by additional cues can be revealed.