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Data mining depends on the ability to access machine-readable metadata that describe genotypes, environmental conditions, and sampling times and strategy. This article presents Xeml Lab. The Xeml Interactive Designer provides an interactive graphical interface at which complex experiments can be designed, and concomitantly generates machine-readable metadata files. It uses a new eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML)-derived dialect termed XEML. Xeml Lab includes a new ontology for environmental conditions, called Xeml Environment Ontology. However, to provide versatility, it is designed to be generic and also accepts other commonly used ontology formats, including OBO and OWL. A review summarizing important environmental conditions that need to be controlled, monitored and captured as metadata is posted in a Wiki ( ) to promote community discussion. The usefulness of Xeml Lab is illustrated by two meta-analyses of a large set of experiments that were performed with Arabidopsis thaliana during 5 years. The first reveals sources of noise that affect measurements of metabolite levels and enzyme activities. The second shows that Arabidopsis maintains remarkably stable levels of sugars and amino acids across a wide range of photoperiod treatments, and that adjustment of starch turnover and the leaf protein content contribute to this metabolic homeostasis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A platform has been developed to measure the activity of 23 enzymes that are involved in central carbon and nitrogen metabolism in Arabidopsis thaliana. Activities are assayed in optimized stopped assays and the product then determined using a suite of enzyme cycling assays. The platform requires inexpensive equipment, is organized in a modular manner to optimize logistics, calculates results automatically, combines high sensitivity with throughput, can be robotized, and has a throughput of three to four activities in 100 samples per person/day. Several of the assays, including those for sucrose phosphate synthase, ADP glucose pyrophosphorylase (AGPase), ferredoxin-dependent glutamate synthase, glycerokinase, and shikimate dehydrogenase, provide large advantages over previous approaches. This platform was used to analyze the diurnal changes of enzyme activities in wild-type Columbia-0 (Col-0) and the starchless plastid phosphoglucomutase (pgm) mutant, and in Col-0 during a prolongation of the night. The changes of enzyme activities were compared with the changes of transcript levels determined with the Affymetrix ATH1 array. Changes of transcript levels typically led to strongly damped changes of enzyme activity. There was no relation between the amplitudes of the diurnal changes of transcript and enzyme activity. The largest diurnal changes in activity were found for AGPase and nitrate reductase. Examination of the data and comparison with the literature indicated that these are mainly because of posttranslational regulation. The changes of enzyme activity are also strongly delayed, with the delay varying from enzyme to enzyme. It is proposed that enzyme activities provide a quasi-stable integration of regulation at several levels and provide useful data for the characterization and diagnosis of different physiological states. As an illustration, a decision tree constructed using data from Col-0 during diurnal changes and a prolonged dark treatment was used to... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]