Correlation of metabolic fingerprints with differential growth responses of cold-inhibited salicylate mutants

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Cold is a major environmental stress that determines the agricultural and horticultural productivity of particular geographical locations. Low temperatures impact meat as well as crop production, by limiting early-season growth of forage grass. Climate change adds a major uncertainty to future projections of world food production, with some current theories indicating cooling rather than warming of the UK climate. Last year we published a new discovery on the hormonal controls of plant growth at low temperature, finding mutants of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana that showed much stronger than normal growth in controlled environments cooled to 5oC. This research was financed by the BBSRC Plant and Microbial Sciences Committee [Scott IM, Clarke SM, Wood JE, Mur LAJ (2004) Salicylate accumulation inhibits growth at chilling temperature in Arabidopsis. Plant Physiology 135:1040-1049]. The present proposal is a follow-up, which capitalises on the launch of the BBSRC's Plant and Microbial Metabolomics (MeT-RO) Centre, and seeks to use these facilities to analyse a wide spectrum of the low molecular weight biochemicals in plant cells, to produce so-called 'metabolic fingerprints'. Our preliminary studies show that metabolic fingerprints can be used to classify Arabidopsis mutants according to their propensity for growth at low temperature. The MeT-RO Centre service will produce detailed and informative metabolic fingerprints from which we will learn a great deal about the cellular states that determine the ability of plants to grow more strongly in the cold.