Speaker
Marin Wiltse
Speaker's Institution
Colorado State University
Date
2021-11-10
Time
4:00 PM
Location
Chemistry A101
Mixer Time
3:45 PM
Mixer Time
Chemistry B101E
Calendar (ICS) Event
Additional Information

Literature Seminar:

With the ever-growing population, food scarcity is becoming a more prominent issue, but part of this issue comes back to climate change and the extreme weather patterns that can destroy crops. Plant metabolomics is an emerging approach to better understand the relationship between environmental stressors, such as climatic, chemical, or biological events, and overall plant health. It looks at the concentrations or levels of metabolites coupled with specific metabolic processes to provide insight into internal plant response. Targeted metabolites are used as biomarkers for environmental stressors and to inform plant response to such events. These target metabolites can be either primary, which will fluctuate in concentrations, or they can be secondary, which only appear in response to a specific stress.  The typical approach to study the metabolites is either Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) or Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (LCMS). Both techniques have benefits, but alone, neither is able to provide a comprehensive picture of the plant metabolome. Thus, by pairing the techniques, NMR can provide structural information and LCMS can provide chemical characterization, which strengthens the identification and characterization of the unknown metabolites. While the techniques are well practiced and understood, a new method to fuse data sets between the two instruments has emerged, which is showing a clearer correlation and distinction between variables. By fusing the data sets, multivariate analysis, such as Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis, provides more distinct results to help differentiate between data sets. The benefits of this novel combined NMR and LCMS technique will be discussed, along with how fusing the data sets provides new information that provides new insight into plant metabolomics.