Cristina Amarante December 13, 2019

MS Biology Dr. Helen Pondevida

Lipidome
The new instrument will help Ruth Welti and other researchers study plant responses to heat and

cold stress, plant infection by pathogens, and the development of plants and seeds, including

seed oil production. To support her collaborative work, Ruth Welti, University Distinguished

Professor of Biology, recently received a grant of more than $440,000 from the National Science

Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation program. The grant with matching funds from the

university will be used to purchase the most advanced mass spectrometer for the Kansas

Lipidomics Research Center, which Welti directs. Welti said that, “We are trying to understand

the basis for the way plants respond to stresses so the information can be used to improve crop

plants and We want to obtain global information on plant responses and see how it relates to

plant genotype." Mostly the researchers gather in Arabidopsis can be translated into crop plants.

Ruth Welti want to be able to improve plants so they can withstand environmental stresses better.

That way, when they have a summer like this last one with a lot of extra heat, crops will be better

able to withstand it. Enable to understand the genetic basis of plant stress, the researchers are

studying a broad range of plant stresses, including heat, cold, freezing, salinity, bacterial

pathogen infection and fungal pathogen infection. The scientist are also looking at how plants

respond to mechanical wounding, such as insect biting or animal grazing. In addition, they

looking at how stresses affect plants’ ability to continue growing and living and assessing how

long they can endure stress and assessing their response to stress in relation genetic makeup.

Genetic changes can affect lipid composition, and they think the lipid changes are signals within

and between plants as they respond to stress. According to the study, It is interesting to consider

the potential functional ramifications of the diurnal lipid compositional changes. The increased

unsaturation of lipids formed in the dark, even at constant temperature, may provide a functional
Cristina Amarante December 13, 2019
MS Biology Dr. Helen Pondevida

advantage for a plant coping with the lower temperatures that typically occur at night; plants

subjected to cold generally do increase the unsaturation of their membrane lipids (Welti et

al., 2002).

Due to climate change, land plants may suffer heat stress, which causes an increase in

molecular disorder and disintegration of lipid bilayers. Heat stress-induced reactive oxygen

species promote peroxidation of unsaturated fatty acids. Plastidic fatty acid desaturase (FAD)

mutants, in which the number of glycerolipid fatty acid double bonds is reduced, are known to be

heat tolerant. The lipidomics data indicate that the composition of membrane lipids in leaves was

dynamic under heat stress within one day. Most of these changes can be understood by a

decrease in unsaturated fatty acids from chloroplast membranes. This decrease was likely

derived from (1) lipid transfer between chloroplasts and the ER and (2) decrease in chloroplast

glycolipids and PG containing 18:3 and 16:3 by lipid turnover. This process was likely enhanced

by increases in 18:3-containing TAG species. In most cases, microarray results suggest the

regulation of glycerolipid metabolism at the transcriptional level. However, for lack of gene

annotations, the process of degradation and export of chloroplastic 16:3 and 18:3 cannot be

explained. The integration of the lipidomics data and transcriptome data will be useful for

elucidation of the unknown pathways in the future.

In the present study, an effective comprehensive analytical approach based on UPLC-Q-

TOF-MS and multivariate statistical analysis was successfully developed to explore the lipid

responses of P. haitanensis to high-temperature stress. A total of 39 glycolipid and phospholipid

biomarkers including DAG, DGDG, Lyso-MGDG, Lyso-DGDG, SQDG, LysoSQDG, Lyso-PA,

Lyso-PC, Lyso-PE, Lyso-PI, Lyso-PG, and PIP were screened and identified to be related to the

hightemperature stress response of the alga. The biomarker-based heat map and box-plots
Cristina Amarante December 13, 2019
MS Biology Dr. Helen Pondevida

suggested that the levels of most of these lipid biomarkers showed downregulation with

temperature increase. The findings of the present study provide insights into the lipid metabolism

in P. haitanensis in responding to high-temperature stress, which are the important information

for studies regarding photosynthesis rate, signal transduction, and cell membrane stability.

In this study they investigated the lipid composition of barley roots of Clipper and Sahara

– two genotypes with contrasting responses to salinity – before and after salinity stress using a

combination of three lipidomics techniques: Fatty acid compositional analysis, untargeted lipid

profiling, and targeted analysis to profile quantitatively the individual molecular species of key

plant lipid classes. The study results provide new insight into the effect of salinity on fatty acid

profiles and key lipid classes within barley roots of two different genotypes, which is discussed

in the context of current knowledge of the root metabolic responses of cereal crops to salinity

stress.

Plant lipids are extensively studied mainly due to their economic significance as energy-

storage compounds.The study of lipid biosynthetic pathways has benefitted greatly from

improvements in mass spectrometry allowing the science of lipidomics to develop. By enabling

the capture of the entire lipidome at any point in time from an individual tissue type, the resulting

information can be used to compare species and treatments which are especially relevant to the

study of abiotic stress. The researchers present an overview integrating gene expression and

lipidomic data published so far in Arabidopsis and its relative the extremophile Eutrema

salsugineum. This data enables a better understanding of the contribution of the lipidome in

determining the ability to tolerate suboptimal temperature conditions. Collectively this

information will allow us to identify the key lipids and pathways responsible for resilience,

enabling the development of new approaches for crop tolerance to stress. Research into the
Cristina Amarante December 13, 2019
MS Biology Dr. Helen Pondevida

response of the plant lipidome during periods of cold stress is a relatively recent area of work

incorporating metabolite and transcriptomic approaches. The principle obstacle to overcome is

the low level and high turnover of some (signalling) lipid species. Recent advances in the

sensitivity and the accuracy of mass spectrometry and its linked chromatography are offering

new insight into some of these hard to quantify lipids which when coupled with the power

of RNA-Seq can identify the complex network of proteins that protect the plant from damage at

low temperatures. 

References:
Barreri-Sicilia, C., Silvestre, S., Haslam, R., & Michaelson, L. (2017, October). Lipid remodelling:
Unravelling the response to cold stress in Arabidopsis and its extremophile relative Eutrema
salsugineum. Plant Science, 263, 194-200. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plantsci.2017.07.017

Juanjuan Chen, Rui Yang, Min Li, Qijun Luo, Jilin Xu, Yangfang Ye, & Xiaojun Yan. (2015). Profiling
lipidome changes of Pyropia haitanensis in short-term. Journal of Applied Phycology, 28(3), 11.
doi:doi:10.1007/s10811-015-0733-z

Maatta, S., Scheu, B., Roth, M. R., Tamura, P., Lin, M., Williams, T., . . . Welti, R. (2012). Levels of
Arabidopsis thaliana Leaf Phosphatidic Acids, Phosphatidylserines, and Most Trienoate-
Containing Polar Lipid Molecular Species Increase during the Dark Period of the Diurnal Cycle.
3(49). doi:doi: 10.3389/fpls.2012.00049

Siria H. A. Natera, Hill, C. B., Thusitha W. T. Rupasinghe, & Ute Roessner. (2015). Salt-stress induced
alterations in the root lipidome of two barley genotypes with contrasting responses to salinity.
Functional Plant Biology, 43(2), 207-219. doi:https://doi.org/10.1071/FP15253

Yasuhiro Hagashi, Yozo Okazaki, Fumiyushi Myuoga, Kazuo Shinozaki, & Kazuki Saito. (2015). Landscape
of the lipidome and transcriptome under heat stress in Arabidopsis thaliana. Scientific Reports.
doi:doi: 10.1038/srep10533