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Metabolites form part of the final steps that shape any organism’s phenotype. Metabolomics, the study of low molecular weight metabolites, is particularly useful as it allows following plants’ responses to biotic or abiotic stress conditions and offers the opportunity to identify biological markers that can be used as diagnosis tools, to understand plant-microbes interactions and to support plant breeding. The Annual International Conference of the Metabolomics Society is the largest metabolomics meeting worldwide, having a list of participants of around 800 researchers. I was able to attend this conference thanks to the support of BSPP Travel Funding, to whom I want to express my gratitude for granting me the opportunity to share my research by presenting a poster.
The conference itself was divided into four sessions, including the plant, food, environment and microbes session. During the first two days of the conference, there were free workshops about data analysis, MVDA, quality assurance, and data sharing. Furthermore, on each night, there was a different activity, including round tables led by metabolomics senior researchers, an early-career night, a job fair, and the conference dinner, during which we enjoyed a ninja, samurai and traditional Japanese dance show!
One of the main focuses of this conference was the fair and sustainable use and analysis of metabolomics data. This idea was stated throughout the different talks, starting with the opening plenary given by Pieter Dorrestein and later by Tomas Pluskal and Sebastian Böcker, who highlighted the importance of generating collaborative research and sharing data to improve our knowledge of the chemical space, which to date keeps being sparse. They presented different metabolomics data processing and analysis software that were designed as open-source tools to facilitate the structural annotation of metabolites and overall data analysis of metabolomics datasets. It was interesting to know that some of these platforms, such as MASST, now have specific databases for the chemotaxonomic exploration of molecules of microbes (microbeMASST) and plants (PlantMASST) and that it has been used in different studies to understand microbial metabolisms and interactions and plants’ chemodiversity.
During the plant session, several talks showed how metabolomics analyses are being used to evaluate plant chemodiversity and biosynthesis, to understand plant responses towards pathogens and beneficial bacteria, to predict agronomic traits or phenotypes of interest, and to study plant beneficial microorganisms. In this session, three research studies were particularly interesting to me. In the first one, the role of glucosinolates in Brassica plants’ responses towards biotic and abiotic stress conditions was presented, finding that it is species and tissue-dependent, in a similar way to what I have found studying cherry and Pseudomonas syringae interactions. The second one showed how a mechanical action, shaking of grapevines, influences the metabolome of the berries, inducing the accumulation of phenolic compounds and lipids at different developmental stages, which, in turn, reduces the susceptibility of the berries to infection by Botrytis cinerea. The third one showed how to characterise biological control strains, such as Streptomyces, which are active against known fungal phytopathogens like Verticillium dahliae and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, showing that the production of antibiotics can be elicited depending on the carbon source present in the media (again, similar to what we have found about the phytotoxins production in a cherry-pathogenic strain of P. syringae).
During my postdoctoral research, I have been studying how trees respond to plant pathogens using untargeted metabolomics. We aim to determine biological markers of disease that could give us insights into how trees respond to the infection against different Pseudomonas syringae pathovars and the Acute Oak Decline pathogens Brenneria goodwinii, Gibsiella quercinecans and Rhanella victoriana. The results I presented at the conference focused on the latter model and included how oak trees naturally produce antimicrobial metabolites, active against plant pathogenic bacteria, how these metabolites’ abundance varies with the tree age and tissue-health status, and how AOD elicits a specific metabolic reprogramming in oaks influencing different chemical families like flavonoids, prenol lipids and tannins. My poster was one of the few works that studied tree metabolomics, making it interesting for the plant community and for the researchers who work on microbes interactions. We were able to discuss the complexity of trees’ metabolomes and how we should start to seek collaborations to increase the metabolite annotation rates of these organisms with groups that focused on the study of plant-derived metabolites and antimicrobials. As a result of the discussions, I was able to design new experiments to evaluate the impact of the biological markers I have found on the pathogen’s behaviour, which strengthens my current data analysis.
Participating in this conference was a fantastic experience. I was able to discuss my experiments, ideas and results and learn from other people’s perspectives and research. Participation in the round tables gave me the opportunity to get advice from senior researchers about how to write successful grants, get my papers published and create international working networks. The MetaboArt contest (in which I was honoured to get 3rd place) gave us the opportunity to present our research in creative ways to increase interest in our research, highlight its importance and share our results with the community. I would like to thank the BSPP again for their generous grant and my research group at the University of Birmingham for their support through my postdoctoral research.
Diana Vinchira-Villarraga
University of Birmingham, UK
An overview of my experience at the 20th Annual International Conference of the Metabolomics Society.
