Editorial Article
Wednesday July 28, 2010
by Caitlin Smith
Plant biologists are now taking advantage of many of the new molecular tools that have evolved through work on animal species—with exciting results. Plant biologists who rely on antibodies, for example, have more choices than ever before. And plant researchers making forays into the relatively new field of plant metabolomics will find some very cool tools awaiting them. Below are some developments in today’s fast-paced areas of plant research.
Plant biologists are now taking advantage of many of the new molecular tools that have evolved through work on animal species—with exciting results. Plant biologists who rely on antibodies, for example, have more choices than ever before. And plant researchers making forays into the relatively new field of plant metabolomics will find some very cool tools awaiting them. Below are some developments in today’s fast-paced areas of plant research.
Plant compartment identification
A good antibody is a cool tool no matter what the field of science. AgriSera makes monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies at almost any scale for plant epitopes. “We offer an ever-expanding range of custom and catalog antibodies, and in many cases calibrated quantitation standards (for photosynthetic and nitrogen metabolism proteins),” says Joanna Porankiewicz-Asplund, product manager at AgriSera. She believes that AgriSera’s products undergo a more extensive validation process than do others. “Each antibody target is developed with a specific goal in mind. A set of our antibodies are ‘global,’ meaning that they recognize that protein from the target range of species with equal efficiency. Other antibodies are isoform specific and can discriminate between similar proteins. Clearly, the quantitation standards expand the applicability of our antibodies beyond the qualitative and into the quantitative.”
A boon to plant biologists looking for cool antibody tools are AgriSera’s antibodies for labeling all main compartments within plant cells. “Plant cell compartment marker antibodies, important to validate a purity of plant cell fractions, and antibodies to the photosynthetic complexes, PSI and PSII, and Rubisco, are very popular with a wide range of researchers,” says Porankiewicz-Asplund. “Photosynthetic antibodies can be used to follow and quantitate the complexes with different environmental factors or in different strains or individuals.” They are also exploring labeled primary antibodies for multiplexing experiments, “where one can envisage tracking 2-4 proteins simultaneously in the same blot as well as a novel immunolocalization protocol,” says Porankiewicz-Asplund.
Plant protein quantification
AgriSera also offers their antibodies as cool tools to quantify proteins. Western blotting can show qualitative changes in the relative abundance of individual proteins. “The addition of quantitation standards into the Western blotting protocol adds a whole new element to process,” says Porankiewicz-Asplund. “Now not only can changes be measured with certainty, but the absolute amounts of different proteins can be measured and compared with other proteins. This powerful addition to the technique allows the researcher to measure, for instance, PSI, PSII, Rubisco, and ATP synthase in a single extract of sample. With the quantitative approach, the researcher can then model the photosynthetic process, carbon fixation, and ATP production simultaneously.”
According to Porankiewicz-Asplund, one of the biggest challenges in plant antibody research today is the large number of species studied by a relatively small number of researchers. “If you think of the biomedical antibody production business for a moment, you realize that there is a very large number of researchers working on a small number of species,” says Porankiewicz-Asplund. “This means that very specific antibodies can be produced with a large target market.” However, this would not work for plant biology, a problem that AgriSera addresses with their ‘Global Antibodies,’ which can be used with equal efficiency across a broad range of species. “Our ‘Global Antibodies’ have been designed with a bioinformatic approach to select conserved regions for target production,” says Porankiewicz-Asplund. “The resulting antibodies can be reliably used across a range of species, saving researchers’ funds.”
Metabo-cool tools for plant physiology
Alisdair Fernie leads the Central Metabolism group in the Department of Molecular Physiology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology. He says that in his opinion, one of the greatest challenges that plant biologists will face in the near future is realizing the ability “to fully comprehend the molecular networks which plants invoke to maintain their best survival opportunity.” Fernie’s group uses metabolomics as a cool tool to study molecular plant physiology. Metabolomics is the study of the unique collection of small-molecule metabolites – chemicals generated by particular cellular processes – that comprise the cell. The rapidly growing field of metabolic profiling is used for phenotyping plants, as well as in diagnostic analyses. It is also increasingly used for functionally annotating genes and studying how various cell types respond to different biological conditions.
“I extensively use metabolomics technologies, both independently – and increasingly with next generation sequencing of genomes and/or transcriptomes,” says Fernie. “Without a shadow of a doubt," he adds, the most exciting tool developed for plant biologists today, "is next generation sequencing – this will revolutionize the field in an unprecedented manner. I am immensely excited by this.” Metabolomics technologies have also been used to examine the variance in metabolite content between individual plants, a method that could greatly improve the quality of agricultural crops.
Indeed, though not there yet, Fernie hopes to find a way to identify different types of cells by their different metabolomic stamps. “There are probably 40 plant cell types,” he says. “I would love a method that sorted all of them and allowed us to subsequently define their differential metabolomes.” In this fast-paced field, it wouldn’t be surprising if these cool tools helped to sort them out soon.