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| Title: | Mass Spectrometric Approaches to Carbohydrate Metabolomics in Wheat |
| Presenter: | S.J. Robinson, Department of Chemistry, University of York |
| Date & Time: | October 15, 2004, 8:45 PM |
| Abstract: |
Wheat is the world’s major crop in terms of food production, and bread wheat (Triticum Aestivum) is the most widely cultivated variety of all of the triticum species. The world’s growing population is placing increasing demands on available agricultural land to produce greater yields from crops. It is known that some of the soluble carbohydrate metabolites in wheat stems are transported into the plant’s grains [1]. It has been suggested that some wheat genotypes, which contain high concentrations of soluble carbohydrates in their stems, may be able to deposit more carbohydrates into the grains of the plant and significantly increase grain yield [2]. We have extracted aqueous soluble carbohydrates from the stems of T.aestivum cultivar Bolero, a spring wheat, and from a range of other cultivars and their crosses; Rialto and Spark, both winter wheats and high and low in stem carbohydrates respectively, at anthesis (flowering) and 14 and 22 days post anthesis. Electrospray (ES) and matrix assisted laser desorption ionisation (MALDI) quadrupole orthogonal time-of-flight (Q-oTOF) mass spectrometry have been used to generate structural information from the isolated carbohydrates; we show that the stem carbohydrates are consistent with non-reducing polyfructosylsucrose (fructan) structures. We have developed an LC-MS method, using a porous graphitic carbon chromatography column, for separating and analysing native carbohydrates. This method has been used to analyse stem carbohydrates extracted from the wheat cultivars, mentioned above, and comparisons between the soluble stem carbohydrates from the different cultivars will be commented on. A metabolomics software tool, Metalign, that can align and compare LC-MS datasets, has been applied to the data and significant differences between different cultivars have been observed. Acknowledgement The authors gratefully acknowledge Professor John Snape at the John Innes Centre, Norwich for providing the seeds of Rialto, Spark and their crosses.
[1] I.F. Wardlaw, H.K. Porter, Aust. J. Biol. Sci. 20 (1967) 309. |