Genome-Wide Association Mapping Reveals That Specific and Pleiotropic Regulatory Mechanisms Fine-Tune Central Metabolism and Growth in Arabidopsis.

Central metabolism is a coordinated network that is regulated at multiple levels by resource availability and by environmental and developmental cues. Its genetic architecture has been investigated by mapping metabolite quantitative trait loci (QTL). A more direct approach is to identify enzyme activity QTL, which distinguishes between QTL in structural genes encoding enzymes and regulatory QTL.