Robert Hall

I am Deputy Business Unit Manager Bioscience and Professor of Plant Metabolomics at Wageningen University, Laboratory of Plant Physiology.
For the last 25 years my research activities have been centred around the development and application of metabolomics technology for plants, with particular emphasis on crop species. We use metabolomics approaches to gain a better understanding of the biochemical composition of plant materials and to ascertain how this is influenced by genotype and environment. We work on both fresh plant materials (regarding e.g. whole plant development, fruit ripening, seed maturation, plant-pathogen interactions etc) as well as processed plant (food) materials (e.g. fruit juices, tomato paste, roasted coffee beans, tea etc). We have established an extensive plant metabolomics platform comprising 6 LC and GC Mass Spectrometers supported by all required in silico tools for data management, processing and statistical analysis and (our in house) metabolite databases.

Presentation

How feasible might it be to implement on-line metabolomics into High Throughput Plant Phenotyping pipelines?

INTRODUCTION: Following on from the genomics era, there is a current rapidly-growing interest in plant and crop biology research relating to our desire to be able to perform multiple phenotypic measurements on plants, in time and across their growth cycle.

Many countries have now established national plant phenotyping centres which can work with small (seedling) to larger 150 cm plants growing under fully controlled and monitored environmental conditions. Standard measurements such as size, growth rate, leaf area / angle, flower positions etc are already routine along with a number of spectral measurements of e.g. colour and photosynthetic efficiency.

It would be of great value - knowing that plants respond rapidly to (a)biotic stresses by reprogramming their metabolism - to also be able to include routine, repetitive chemical analyses of plant tissues in a non-destructive manner. But how feasible is it to integrate a metabolomics platform into the standard plant phenotyping pipeline?

DISCUSSION: In this speculative talk, opportunities and challenges for performing online / inline GCMS and LCMS sampling and analysis techniques shall be discussed in the context of the desired and needs of HTP plant phenotyping strategies.

Attention will especially be given to existing technologies which are potentially already available but which have yet to be tested for such a specific application. We conclude that while greenhouse applications could indeed prove feasible, potential field-based opportunities may still prove a major challenge with the existing technology platforms.