A groundbreaking new method, called Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST), enables scientists to study the metabolic dynamics of plants in a completely non-invasive way, paving the way for unprecedented insights into crop improvement and environmental adaptations.
The Metabolic Landscape Revealed
The world of plant science has been blessed with the ‘omics’ technologies — genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. These essential tools have uncovered many genetic and molecular underpinnings of plant growth and development.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of plant metabolites (all small molecules or metabolites within the plant, also known as its “metabolome”) have stubbornly remained beyond reach. The metabolome is significantly more dynamic than the relatively constant genome, with concentrations of different classes of chemical species changing spatially and temporally. This fast-changing trait has made it difficult to study with traditional methods.
A group of scientists of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) and the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) have now developed a method that could change this. The new technique, Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) can be used to noninvasively image sugars and amino acids in situ, i.e. without destroying the seed or fruit being studied, in living plants on time scales of less than a minute; this opens up previously-inaccessible areas for chemical imaging that could not have been probed by conventional approximations.
Unlocking Nature’s Secrets to Crop Improvement
Non-invasive studies of plant metabolism have a great potential in the area of crop improvement. This knowledge can add a new dimension since breeders have always grappled with having an understanding about how fast (temporal) sugars and amino acids are flowing within the various organs or tissues of the plant to meet its mass transport, energy production, and plant health.
For example, CEST provides a means by which scientists can access this protected information without invasive sampling or painstaking sample preparation. This method enables a circulatory system-like function to repeatedly analyze sugar and amino acid transport over entire plants, down to MICRO-meters in size on a scale of seconds or minutes, generating new knowledge power for higher plant productivity, nutrition and environment tolerance.
The researchers have already shown the utility of this approach with metabolite dynamics in seeds undergoing growth, which was challenging to measure by any existing method. This information could prove to be a game changer for breeders as it helps them in understanding the determinants of trait formation and gain insight into ways to improve crops down the line.
Conclusion
This is a seminal development in time-resolved plant science, introducing a new and powerful approach for plant scientists to monitor the dynamic metabolic activities within living plants using CEST-based MR imaging techniques. The non-invasive nature of this technology has wide-ranging implications for plant improvement, adaptation to different environments and creating linkages between plant structure and metabolism. While the scientific community continues to unlock the endless capabilities of this revolutionary technique, it is hard not to be optimistic about what lies in the future for innovative plant research.
