Speaker

Dr. Lloyd Sumner is a Professor of Biochemistry and the director of the Metabolomics Center at the University of Missouri. The research focus of the Sumner lab includes the development of cutting-edge technologies for large-scale biochemical profiling of plant metabolites and integrating these with transcriptomics. These technologies are then applied in a symbiotic manner for plant gene discovery, gene characterization and the elucidation of mechanistic responses to external stimuli; especially related to plant specialized metabolism or plant natural products biosynthesis.

Abstract

The vast utility of metabolomics is well documented in the literature; however, its full scientific promise has not yet been realized due to multiple technical challenges. These grand challenges include large-scale confident chemical identification of metabolites and greater depth of coverage.  We have developed sophisticated spectral, computational and integrated experimental metabolomics tools for the systematic and biologically directed annotation of plant metabolomes and for greater metabolome depth of coverage.  This presentation will describe a UHPLC-QTOF-MS/MS mass spectral library, custom software entitled Plant Metabolite Annotation Toolbox (PlantMAT) and sophisticated UHPLC-timsTOF-MS/MS and UHPLC-QTOF-MS-SPE-NMR instrumental ensembles that are being used for ‘sequencing’ the first plant metabolomes.