MALDI Imaging of "Arabidopsis thaliana" for an integrative analysis of topological Metabolome and Proteome features

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The proposal is focused on the development of MALDI-Imaging (MI) techniques for plant tissues under stress. Target compounds in the centre of our research will be small molecules (metabolites), especially compounds of the phenylpropanoid pathway. We will use Arabidopsis thaliana as a model system to investigate the localization of secondary metabolites in different tissues and different developmental stages in response to biological stress. Our hypothesis is that the different phenylpropanoids (and other metabolites) are expressed in a complex and stress-specific pattern within the plant tissues in dependence of the nature of the stress (bacterial infection, herbivore attack) and of the developmental stage. Gene expression data and MA Imaging (MSI) data will be merged. Our strategy will be to process the MS Imaging (MSI) data on top of this rich knowledge background of the existing metabolome and proteome data, to bridge the domains of biochemical knowledge and spatial information on structure derived from the image data of the samples. While the pure processing of MSI including baseline correction, peak selection, filtering and segmentation depends on a well-defined work flow, another, maybe even more challenging task in MS-Imaging is to link the complex MS data to the distribution of known metabolites. Ultimate aim of this approach is to understand the regulation of secondary metabolite production over space and time.