Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XIII ConferenceJanuary 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
J Afzal , S Nolte , R Mungur , B Young , L Tolley , DA Lightfoot
Cataloging the organic components of plants and relating them to genotype is a mammoth task for the post-genomic era. Metabolite profiling by high throughput methods like Fourier transformed ion cyclotron mass spectrometry (FT-ICR-MS) may be a useful tool. We sought to test the validity of FT-ICR-MS derived metabolite profiles with Glycine max (soybean), Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco) and Zea mays (maize). We compared isogeneic lines with altered disease resistance (soybean) or transgenes (tobacco, maize). In soybean full scan FT-ICR-MS analysis of all metabolites between 200-961 d, showed there were 123 metabolites in root extracts and 122 metabolites in leaf extracts that were observed to have changed among 1,054 metabolites detected. In tobaco and corn roots and leafs transgenic for gdhA the numbers of changed metabolites were remarkably similar. We used HPLC (+/-PDA),LCMS-MS-MS and MALDI-TOF MS-MS to verify the identity of a few chemicals and compare approaches. We demonstrate that FT-ICR-MS is a rapid and economical method for the comprehensive analysis of the profile changes caused by alleles in cell composition and by inference metabolism but may not be quantitative. Chemicals associated with disease resistance in soybean were identified and 60% were not previously identified in any plant. We have therefore begun analysis by quadropole MS formats to verify the broad utility of the technique to plant systems and to develop a new database of plant related chemical compounds. Supported by NSF DCB 0405819.