1. High mass resolution, spatial metabolite mapping enhances the current plant gene and pathway discovery toolbox
- Author
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Yonghui Dong, Asaph Aharoni, Hagai Cohen, Liron Feldberg, Shelly Hen Avivi, Guy Polturak, Ilana Rogachev, and Prashant D. Sonawane
- Subjects
0106 biological sciences ,0301 basic medicine ,Agroinfiltration ,Physiology ,Metabolite ,Plant Science ,Computational biology ,Biology ,Genes, Plant ,01 natural sciences ,Mass spectrometry imaging ,Mass Spectrometry ,03 medical and health sciences ,chemistry.chemical_compound ,Solanum lycopersicum ,RNA interference ,Tobacco ,Metabolome ,Gene ,Triticum ,food and beverages ,Metabolic pathway ,030104 developmental biology ,chemistry ,Spectrometry, Mass, Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption-Ionization ,Function (biology) ,010606 plant biology & botany - Abstract
Understanding when and where metabolites accumulate provides important cues to the gene function. Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) enables in situ temporal and spatial measurement of a large assortment of metabolites, providing mapping information regarding their cellular distribution. To describe the current state and technical advances using MSI in plant sciences, we employed MSI to demonstrate its significant contribution to the study of plant specialised metabolism. We show that coupling MSI with: (1) RNA interference (RNAi), (2) virus induced gene silencing (VIGS), (3) agroinfiltration or (4) samples derived from plant natural variation provides great opportunities to understand the accurate gene-metabolite relationship and discover novel gene-associated metabolites. This was exemplified in three plant species (i.e. tomato, tobacco and wheat) by mapping the distribution of metabolites possessing a range of polarities. In particular, we demonstrated that MSI is able to spatially map an entire metabolic pathway, including intermediates and final products, in the intricate biosynthetic route to tomato fruit steroidal glycoalkaloids. We therefore envisage MSI as a key component of the metabolome analysis arsenal employed in plant gene discovery strategies. more...
- Published
- 2020