HPLC-MS/MS method applied to an untargeted metabolomics approach for the diagnosis of “olive quick decline syndrome”

Abstract

Olive quick decline syndrome (OQDS) is a disorder associated with bacterial infections caused by Xylella fastidiosa subsp. pauca ST53 in olive trees. Metabolic profile changes occurring in infected olive trees are still poorly investigated, but have the potential to unravel reliable biomarkers to be exploited for early diagnosis of infections. In this study, an untargeted metabolomic method using high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to quadrupole-time-of-flight high-resolution mass spectrometry (HPLC-ESI-Q-TOF-MS) was used to detect differences in samples (leaves) from healthy (Ctrl) and infected (Xf) olive trees. Both unsupervised and supervised data analysis clearly differentiated the groups. Different metabolites have been identified as potential specific biomarkers, and their characterization strongly suggests that metabolism of flavonoids and long-chain fatty acids is perturbed in Xf samples. In particular, a decrease in the defence capabilities of the host after Xf infection is proposed because of a significant dysregulation of some metabolites belonging to flavonoid family. Moreover, oleic acid is confirmed as a putative diffusible signal factor (DSF). This study provides new insights into the host-pathogen interactions and confirms LC-HRMS-based metabolomics as a powerful approach for disease-associated biomarkers discovery in plants. Graphical abstract

Metabolomics-Driven Mining of Metabolite Resources: Applications and Prospects for Improving Vegetable Crops

“…The technique of studying structural identity, quantity and the characters of metabolites within the whole metabolome is ‘metabolomics’ [ 44 ]. The metabolomic interventions offer opportunities to fingerprint key chemical footprints of the cells with high sensitivity, accuracy and preciseness [ 56 , 57 , 58 ] either in a targeted way [ 44 ] or in nontargeted (unbiased) manner [ 59 ] ( Figure 1 ). Being viewed as complementary to transcriptomics and proteomics [ 60 ], plant metabolomics has versatile implications in metabolome profiling, metabolic pathway dissection, population genetic interpretation, species discrimination and comprehensive analysis [ 61 ].…”

Comprehensive liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry-based metabolomic analysis of Moringa oleifera seeds

“…The choice of solvents used for extraction is a key factor in determining the metabolites of interest to be extracted, since the main aim of the step is to extract as wide a spectrum of chemical compounds as possible from the sample in consideration (Lu et al, 2017). The ethyl acetate which is a medium polar solvent has been reported to be the best extraction solvent in terms of number of metabolites with large chemical and structural diversity detected by MS (Colnaghi et al, 2007;Beaulieu et al, 2013;Lindow et al, 2014;Di Masi et al, 2022).…”

MS-FINDER Assisted in Understanding the Profile of Flavonoids in Temporal Dimension during the Fermentation of Pu-erh Tea

“…This emerging metabolomics tool can be used for similarity-based matching of known and unknown compounds and displaying the result in the form of a visual. The two software are emerging for the analysis of lipids, food components, metabolites of cellular extracts, and other compounds, either alone or in combination with other software. − Therefore, we combine them to achieve a better performance in flavonoid annotation, and this is the first time that they have been integrated for analyzing tea samples.…”