Pioneering mass spectrometry methods offers insights into tissue structures

Innovative mass spectrometry methods developed at the US Department for Energy's Ames Laboratory have helped biologists improve their understanding of plant tissue structures.

The new methods are expected to open up a host of new areas to study as never-before-seen elements of the make-up of these organisms have been uncovered by the techniques.

Basil Nikolau, the Ames Laboratory faculty scientist heading up the project, funded by DOE's Office of Science, said that the data the researchers are seeing is "unprecedented".

This is a result of the creation of a new, highly-sensitive, mass spectrometry technique to investigate metabolites, the small molecules that perform the job of building blocks for biological processes in plants.

"Before these advances, in order to analyze plant material, biologists were forced to crush up tissue. We would lose spatial information, where these metabolites were located in different types of plant cells," said Mr Nikolau.

Young-Jin Lee, a faculty scientist in Ames Laboratory's Chemical and Biological Sciences Division, has successfully demonstrated the use of matrix-assisted laser deposition/ionisation-mass spectrometry, or MALDI-MS, to map the lipids in cottonseed in a recent paper published in The Plant Cell, a premier research publication in plant science.

The techniques used by the research team has also been featured in a special issue of The Plant Journal, which highlights the latest development in high-resolution measurements in plant biology.

Its imaging technique can make maps of the locations of molecules in plant materials with resolution of 10 to 50 microns, less than a quarter the size of a human hair.

The Traditional methods used in gas chromatography and mass spectrometry enabled plant biologists to understand "what and how much" of plant metabolites, but not the "where."

Mr Lee said that there is still a great deal to learn in terms of the development of the procedure, but he said using MALDI-MS to detect the tiny amounts of material in cells will become more prevalent in plant science.

Posted by Fiona Griffiths