Unidimensional and multidimensional NMR approaches to covering the plant metabolome

Abstract

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has been used as a high-throughput method for metabolome studies due its inherently quantitative and non-destructive analyses, does not depend on analyte volatility, polarity, molecular weight, size, chemical structure, sample matrix and minimal sample preparations. Plants are the source of an almost uncountable number of metabolites whose structure, function and usability have been explored only partially. NMR-based plant metabolomics has been used to assess the biological variation of plants grown under controlled conditions and to investigated the substantial equivalence or otherwise of traditional and transformed plants. Most of the NMR analyses are based on 1H NMR that produces high-resolution spectra with good sensitivity because of its inherent high sensitivity and its high abundance in biological systems. However, due to proton-proton scalar coupling, signal overlap is present in almost all 1H NMR spectra. Numerous efforts have focused to improve resolution and sensitivity in NMR-based metabolomics, such as, innovations in 1D and 2D NMR pulse sequence without cost at resolution and development superconducting magnets, cryoprobe and microprobe. Thereby, in this proposal we will use standard NMR pulse sequence and investigated the viability of advanced NMR technique such as PSYCHE (Pure Shift Yielded by Chirp Excitation) for homonuclear broadband decoupling, 2D and 3D NMR experiments using ultra-high field NMR spectrometers to study soybean metabolome.