[SCAN] Metabolomics Challenges in Plant Abiotic Stress

Scan Seminar

Title: Metabolomics Challenges in Plant Abiotic Stress: flooding, a case study

Speaker: Carla António

From: Plant Metabolomics Lab, ITQB
 

Abstract:

Due to their sessile nature, plants cannot escape from regularly changing environmental and seasonal conditions that adversely affect their growth and development. Their survival depends largely on the initiation of highly complex adaptive responses involving stress sensing, signal transduction and the activation of a number of stress-related genes and metabolites. Central metabolism including carbohydrate, nitrogen and energy metabolism, is essential for plant life, and flexibility to reconfigure these primary metabolic pathways to sustain cellular homeostasis is crucial for plants to develop strategies that allow them to survive. The ultimate goal of plant metabolomics is to study the plant system at the molecular level providing non-biased characterisation of the total metabolite pool (the metabolome) of a plant tissue in response to its environment. However, no single analytical technology can cover the wide spectrum of compounds that constitute the plant metabolome, and so current modern plant metabolomics studies often combine multiple analytical platforms to acquire more comprehensive metabolite coverage from a complex biological plant sample. In this presentation I will present current challenges in the analysis of the complex plant primary metabolome, focussing on a study of the metabolic adaptations of Glycine max (soybean) roots under hypoxia using GC-TOF-MS metabolite profiling and stable isotope feeding experiments.