Tag Archives: metabonomics

Metabolomics and transcriptomics to decipher molecular mechanisms underlying ectomycorrhizal root colonization of an oak tree

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M. Sebastiana, A. Gargallo-Garriga, J. Sardans, M. Pérez-Trujillo, F. Monteiro, A. Figueiredo, M. Maia, R. Nascimento, M. Sousa Silva, A. N. Ferreira, C. Cordeiro, A. P. Marques, L. Sousa, R. Malhó & J. Peñuelas

Scientific Reports volume 11, Article number: 8576 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-87886-5

Mycorrhizas are known to have a positive impact on plant growth and ability to resist major biotic and abiotic stresses. However, the metabolic alterations underlying mycorrhizal symbiosis are still understudied. By using metabolomics and transcriptomics approaches, cork oak roots colonized by the ectomycorrhizal fungus Pisolithus tinctorius were compared with non-colonized roots. Results from this global metabolomics analysis suggest decreases in root metabolites which are common components of exudates, and in compounds related to root external protective layers which could facilitate plant-fungal contact and enhance symbiosis. Root metabolic pathways involved in defense against stress were induced in ectomycorrhizal roots that could be involved in a plant mechanism to avoid uncontrolled growth of the fungal symbiont in the root apoplast. Several of the identified symbiosis-specific metabolites, such as GABA, may help to understand how ectomycorrhizal fungi such as P. tinctorius benefit their host plants.

SeRMN contributions at 10th GERMN biennial /9th IberAmerican/7th Iberian NMR Meeting

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Some of the SeRMN staff has presented our recent research work at the biannual Spanish and IberAmerican NMR meeting, 10th GERMN biennial /9th IberAmerican/7th Iberian NMR Meeting. This year it was a virtual meeting taking place from 26 to 29 April 2021.

Pau Nolis presented an oral communication entitled “Reducing experimental time using Multiple Fid Acquisition“. P. Nolis, K. Motiram-Corral, M. Pérez-Trujillo, T. Parella.

Speeding-up NMR molecular analysis is an important research field which has been continuously advancing since NMR early days. The relevant benefits are clear and evident: i) reduce analysis time per sample => reduce analysis cost; ii) gain spectrometer time to analyze new samples => improve spectrometer efficiency. Multiple FID Acquisition (MFA) strategy consists in the design of NMR pulse sequence experiments accommodating N acquisition windows, each registering different relevant structural information. This strategy is faster
than perform a traditional sequential acquisition of N separated experiments. Several design strategies and practical experiments will be shown and discussed.

Míriam Pérez-Trujillo presented an oral communication entitled “Simultaneous Enantiospecific Detection of Multiple Metabolites in Mixtures using NMR Spectroscopy“. L. T. Kuhn, K. Motiram-Corral, T. J. Athersuch, T. Parella, M. Pérez-Trujillo.

Chirality plays a fundamental role in nature, but its detection and quantification still face many limitations. To date, the enantiospecific analysis of mixtures necessarily requires prior separation of the individual components. The simultaneous enantiospecific detection of multiple chiral molecules in a mixture represents a major challenge, which would lead to a
significantly better understanding of the underlying biological processes; e.g. via enantiospecifically analyzing metabolites in their native environment. Here, we report on the first in situ enantiospecific detection of a thirty-ninecomponent mixture. As a proof of concept, eighteen essential amino acids (AAs) at physiological concentrations were simultaneously enantiospecifically detected using NMR spectroscopy and a chiral solvating agent. This work
represents a first step towards the simultaneous multicomponent enantiospecific analysis of complex mixtures, a capability that will have substantial impact on metabolism studies, metabolic phenotyping, chemical reaction monitoring, and many other fields where complex mixtures containing chiral molecules require efficient characterization.

Special Issue: NMR-Based Metabolomics

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Special Issue: NMR-Based Metabolomics, by Míriam Pérez-Trujillo* and Toby J. Athersuch*

Molecules2021, 26(11), 3283; https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules26113283

This article belongs to the Special Issue NMR-Based Metabolomics

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy remains one of the core analytical platforms for metabolomics, providing complementary chemical information to others, such as mass spectrometry, and offering particular advantages in some areas of research on account of its inherent robustness, reproducibility, and phenomenal dynamic range. While routine experimental protocols for profiling and related statistical analysis pipelines have been established, they often present considerable challenges to the analyst, including spectral overlap, accurate and precise quantification, and chemical shift variation. Consequently, there is still much activity across all areas of NMR spectroscopic analysis in relation to metabolomics. Furthermore, there remain many biological systems and sample types that have not been extensively explored using NMR spectroscopy-based metabolomics.In this Special Issue, several advances in methodology, and new applications in the field of NMR-based metabolomics, have been presented. In addition, the SI includes authoritative review articles focused on the state-of-the-art of quantitative NMR spectroscopy in biomedical metabolomics applications, and novel applications in the agri-food sector.

Simultaneous Enantiospecific Detection of Multiple Compounds in Mixtures using NMR Spectroscopy

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Simultaneous Enantiospecific Detection of Multiple Compounds in Mixtures using NMR Spectroscopy, by Lars T. Kuhn, Kumar Motiram-Corral, Toby J. Athersuch, Teodor Parella, Míriam Pérez-Trujillo*

Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2020 / doi:10.1002/anie.202011727

Chirality plays a fundamental role in nature, but its detection and quantification still face many limitations. To date, the enantiospecific analysis of mixtures necessarily requires prior separation of the individual components. The simultaneous enantiospecific detection of multiple chiral molecules in a mixture represents a major challenge, which would lead to a significantly better understanding of the underlying biological processes; e.g. via enantiospecifically analysing metabolites in their native environment. Here, we report on the first in situ enantiospecific detection of a thirty‐nine‐component mixture. As a proof of concept, eighteen essential amino acids at physiological concentrations were simultaneously enantiospecifically detected using NMR spectroscopy and a chiral solvating agent. This work represents a first step towards the simultaneous multicomponent enantiospecific analysis of complex mixtures, a capability that will have substantial impact on metabolism studies, metabolic phenotyping, chemical reaction monitoring, and many other fields where complex mixtures containing chiral molecules require efficient characterisation.

Simultaneous enantiospecific detection of a mixture of amino acids by NMR spectroscopy

This work has been selected to be presented as a talk at 2021 scientific conferences:

· 42nd FGMR (German Chemical Society, Magnetic Resonance Section) Annual Discussion Meeting – Virtual, Sep 27 to Oct 1.

· SMASH- Small Molecule NMR Conference 2021 – Virtual, Aug 30 to Sep 2.

· Euromar 2021 Conference – Virtual, 5 to 8 July.

· 10th GERMN (Spanish NMR group of the Real Sociedad Española de Química) biennial & 9th IberoAmerican NMR Meeting – Virtual, 26 to 19 April.

31P-NMR Metabolomics Revealed Species-Specific Use of Phosphorous in Trees

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31P-NMR Metabolomics Revealed Species-Specific Use of Phosphorous in Trees of a French Guiana Rainforest, by Gargallo-Garriga, A.; Sardans, J.; Llusià, J.; Peguero, G.; Asensio, D.; Ogaya, R.; Urbina, I.; Langenhove, L.V.; Verryckt, L.T.; Courtois, E.A.; Stahl, C.; Grau, O.; Urban, O.; Janssens, I.A.; Nolis, P.; Pérez-Trujillo, M.; Parella, T.; Peñuelas, J.  Molecules 2020, 25, 3960. https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules25173960

Productivity of tropical lowland moist forests is often limited by availability and functional allocation of phosphorus (P) that drives competition among tree species and becomes a key factor in determining forestall community diversity. We used non-target 31P-NMR metabolic profiling to study the foliar P-metabolism of trees of a French Guiana rainforest. The objective was to test the hypotheses that P-use is species-specific, and that species diversity relates to species P-use and concentrations of P-containing compounds, including inorganic phosphates, orthophosphate monoesters and diesters, phosphonates and organic polyphosphates. We found that tree species explained the 59% of variance in 31P-NMR metabolite profiling of leaves. A principal component analysis showed that tree species were separated along PC 1 and PC 2 of detected P-containing compounds, which represented a continuum going from high concentrations of metabolites related to non-active P and P-storage, low total P concentrations and high N:P ratios, to high concentrations of P-containing metabolites related to energy and anabolic metabolism, high total P concentrations and low N:P ratios. These results highlight the species-specific use of P and the existence of species-specific P-use niches that are driven by the distinct species-specific position in a continuum in the P-allocation from P-storage compounds to P-containing molecules related to energy and anabolic metabolism.

This article belongs to the Special Issue:

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/molecules/special_issues/nmr_metabolomics

Shifts in plant foliar and floral metabolomes in response to the suppression of the associated microbiota

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logo_BMCPB“Shifts in plant foliar and floral metabolomes in response to the suppression of the associated microbiota” by A. Gargallo-Garriga, J. Sardans, M. Pérez-Trujillo, A. Guenther, J. Llusià, L. Rico, J. Terradas, G. Farré-Armengol, I. Filella, T. Parella and J. Peñuelas. BMC Plant Biology 2016; 16:78. DOI: 10.1186/s12870-016-0767-7

The significance of microbial populations to the health and physiology of human and animal hosts has become a burgeoning and increasingly newsworthy topic. Of course, plants are also hosts for microbial life, and our metabolomics new study in BMC Plant Biology suggests that microbial influence on plant biology is more complex than we currently appreciate. Continue reading Shifts in plant foliar and floral metabolomes in response to the suppression of the associated microbiota →

Visiting PhD Student Yaoyao Wang

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Blog2Today we are saying goodbye to our dear Yaoyao, though we hope to see her very soon again.

Yaoyao is currently finishing her PhD on metabonomics applied to clinical biomarkers in the Legido-Quigley Lab at King’s College London (KCL).

She has been visiting us for the last two months, during which we have been working together in two metabonomics projects related to drug misuse biomarkers and chiral metabonomics. It has been a great pleasure for us to spend this time with her and continue with this collaboration from now on.

Seminar: Biomarker and metabolomics, a novel approach to detect drug misuse

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Yaoyao Wang, visiting PhD student from King’s College London, will be giving a talk on  December the 18th at 10:00 h in the SeRMN. Her talk is entitled “Biomarker and metabolomics: a novel approach to detect drug misuse”.

yaoyao

Yaoyao is from Clinical Biomarkers Lab of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King’s College London (KCL). Her PhD project focuses on developing metabolomics approach to identify biomarkers for drug misuse through the analysis of human biofluids samples and the development of data treatment methods, using R (XCMS) and other bioinformatics tools. She has been collaborating intensively with the Drug Control Centre of KCL using LC-MS.

Her talk will include the metabolomics biomarker discovery of low dose salbutamol in urine collected for anti-doping tests and preliminary longitudinal metabolomics study of “date-rape” drug GHB, as well as a glance of the other on-going projects in Clinical Biomarkers Lab.

All interested people are welcome to attend this seminar.

Metabolic profiling for the detection of early effects of environmental and lifestyle exposure to cadmium.

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“Metabolic Profiling Detects Early Effects of Environmental and Lifestyle Exposure to Cadmium in a Human Population” JK Ellis, TJ Athersuch, LDK Thomas, F Teichert, M Pérez-Trujillo, C Svendsen, D J. Spurgeon, R Singh, L Järup, JG Bundy and HC Keun.  BMC Medicine, February 2012.  DOI: 10.1186/1741-7015-10-61

The ‘exposome’ represents the accumulation of all environmental exposures across a lifetime. Top-down strategies are required to assess something this comprehensive, and could transform our understanding of how environmental factors affect human health. Metabolic profiling (metabonomics / metabolomics)  defines an individual’s metabolic phenotype, which is influenced by genotype, diet, lifestyle, health and xenobiotic exposure, and could also reveal intermediate biomarkers for disease risk that reflect adaptive response to exposure. Continue reading Metabolic profiling for the detection of early effects of environmental and lifestyle exposure to cadmium. →