Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Investigating Rapid Spatial Metabolomic Responses in Local and Systemic Plant Tissue Following Stress Sensation

Myers, Ronald James, Columbia, Mo MO

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Plant Genome Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2025. The fellowship supports a research and training plan in a host laboratory for the Fellow who also presents a plan to broaden participation in biology. The title of the research and training plan for this fellowship to Ronald James Myers Jr. is “Investigating Rapid Spatial Metabolomic Responses in Local and Systemic Plant Tissue Following Stress Sensation”. The host institution for the fellowship is the University of Missouri-Columbia and the sponsoring scientist is Dr. Lloyd W. Sumner. Plants frequently encounter rapidly changing conditions within their environment that have the potential to cause substantial damage. These conditions can encompass numerous environmental factors, such as large temperature fluctuations, changes in water availability, light intensity, and combinations of multiple environmental alterations. When these changes are extreme, these factors have historically resulted in substantial monetary losses for the agricultural industry and have impacted food availability due to resulting detrimental effects on plant growth, yield, and survival. Understanding the processes through which plants rapidly respond to environmental stress is key for the development of new strategies with the potential to reduce and mitigate crop losses. This research aims to increase plant resiliency against rapidly changing environmental conditions using a combination of approaches from modern analytical biochemistry, genetics, and plant physiology. The training plan provides for instruction of the Fellow in novel analytical biochemistry approaches and technologies that will be utilized during the research. With the training achieved during the fellowship, the Fellow aims to broaden the knowledge and availability of novel analytical biochemistry instrumentation at the host institution through the incorporation of recently purchased novel technologies into combined undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral training workshops and development of the technology into an available core service for other scientists at the University of Missouri-Columbia. This project will investigate spatial accumulation of metabolites during abiotic and biotic stress responses in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Overall, the research will expand upon our current scientific knowledge of rapid plant stress responses, allowing for novel genetic approaches aimed at increasing stress resiliency within plants to ensure the long-term sustainability of agriculture. Research goals include (1) determining whether metabolites translocate from local tissue of a plant to systemic tissues at rapid timescales following stress using Ultra High Pressure Liquid Chromatography coupled to tandem Mass Spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS); (2) identifying unique temporal-spatial metabolite accumulation patterns in response to stress with Desorption Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry Imaging (DESI-MSI); and, (3) identifying uniquely accumulated, stress-specific metabolites that act as key drivers of stress-specific acclimatory responses through systemic acquired acclimation (SAA), quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), and RNA-Sequencing analyses. Results acquired from this research will be made publicly available through open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals. Obtained metabolomics data will be deposited on Metabolomics Workbench (https://www.metabolomicsworkbench.org/) and transcriptomic data will be deposited on NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo). In addition, data will be made publicly available on the Sumner Laboratory website (https://sumnerlab.missouri.edu). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.