An award is made to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Saint Louis, Missouri to purchase a high resolution/accurate mass Orbitrap mass spectrometer for plant proteomics and lipidomics studies. The investment in mass spectrometry technology and method development at the Danforth Center benefits integrated studies of plant development and metabolism and provides guiding protocols for the greater scientific community. The projects supported by this new instrumentation aim to increase productivity of food and biofuel crops through a detailed understanding of how plants turn energy provided by the sun to biomass and how plants sense and coordinate their physiology in response to seasonal change using their internal biological timepiece known as the circadian clock. As part of the development of new technologies, the investigators will perform a special study with undergraduates from Harris-Stowe State University and other nearby undergraduate institutions' students to mine the large data stream anticipated to come from the new instrument for biological treasure. The students will get firsthand experience with the contemporary proteomics techniques that may open the door to further bioanalytical studies in their careers. This will add to the educational outreach taking place at the Danforth Center. Currently, the training of tomorrow's scientists occurs through an active NSF-REU program, recruitment of high school students that work in Danforth Center laboratories for classroom credit, participation in a regional program for high school students - STARS (Students and Teachers As Research Scientists), workshops for teachers and an interactive middle- and high school mentoring program that connects our scientists with nearby schools. These programs are essential to core Danforth Center mission goals to strengthen the plant science community.
The long-term goal is to improve plant productivity that: i) proficiently feeds a growing world population, ii) provides sustainable feed-stock alternatives to petroleum and iii) supplies useful bioactive compounds; all designed to improve quality of life. Advanced mass spectrometry instrumentation is needed perform complex stable isotope labeling experiments (an alternative to radioactive isotope labeling) and for characterizing post-translational modifications on proteins that are present a very low level in cells. A major impediment to understanding biochemical function in plants is our incomplete characterization of metabolism and proteins, the cellular machines that it. The dynamism of metabolite and protein levels, including their post-translational modifications (PTMs), are the result of linked networks that establish plant phenotype. Measurement of these biomolecules is critical to assessing plant health and response to changing environments; however, there are hundreds of thousands of metabolites found in the plant kingdom and organisms have more than a million of proteoforms that vary in abundance by many orders of magnitude and that change dynamically with time. Research efforts on NSF-funded and other projects at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and surrounding community are advancing science through methods development on scantly low abundance and highly dynamic proteins and metabolites and will be greatly extended by this technology.
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.
