ABSTRACT: Experimental Goal: To determine the metabolic profile of tomato leaves when transiently expressing NHP and NHP-Glc biosynthetic enzymes.
Methods: Transient expression and SAR assays were performed as previously (Holmes et al., 2019. Science Signaling. 12, eaay3066). Briefly, combinations of Agrobacterium C58C1 pCH32 strains harboring combinations of GFP, FMO1, ALD1, and UGT76B1 were infiltrated into two proximal (bottom, local (L)) leaflets of the third and fourth compound leaves of 4-5-week old tomato plants for 48 h. For metabolic profiling, two proximal and three distal (D) leaflets of the third compound leaf were harvested, lyophilized to dryness, and homogenized using a ball mill (Retsch MM 400) at 25 Hz for 2 min. Samples were resuspended in 20 ul of 80:20 MeOH:H2O per mg dry tissue and incubated at 4C for 10 min. The liquid fraction of each sample was split for LC-MS and GC-MS analysis respectively. Samples for GC-MS analysis were further derivatized with N-methyl-N-(trimethylsilyl)trifluoroacetamide (MSTFA) (Holmes et al., 2019. Science Signaling. 12, eaay3066). NHP-Glc was measured using previously published methods on an Agilent 1260 HPLC coupled to an Agilent 6520 quadrupole time-of-flight electrospray ionization (Q-TOF ESI) mass spectrometer (Chen et al., 2018. PNAS. E4920-E4929). SA and SA-Glc were measured using an Agilent 1290 Infinity II UHPLC coupled to an Agilent 6470 triple quadrupole (QQQ) mass spectrometer. A 1.8 um, 2.1 x 50 mm Zorbax RRHD Eclipse Plus C18 column was used for reverse phase chromatography with mobile phases of A [water with 0.1% formic acid (FA)] and B [acetonitrile (AcN) with 0.1% FA]. The following gradient was used for separation with a flow rate of 0.6 ml/min (percentages indicate percent buffer B): 0-0.2 min (5%), 0.2-4.2 min (5-95%), 4.2-5.2 min (95-100%). The MS was run in negative mode with the following parameters: gas temperature, 250C; gas flow rate, 12 l/min; nebulizer, 25 psig. SA was measured using monitored transitions with the following parameters: Precursor ion, 137.0239; product ions, 93 and 65.1; dwell, 150 ms; fragmentor voltage, 158 V; collision energy, 20 V and 32 V respectively, cell accelerator voltage, 4 V. SA-Glc was measured using monitored transitions with the following parameters: Precursor ion, 299.0767; product ions, 137 and 93; dwell, 150 ms; fragmentor voltage, 158 V; collision energy, 5 V and 20 V respectively, cell accelerator voltage, 4 V. TMS-derivatized samples were measured for Pip and NHP using published methods on an Agilent 7820A gas chromatograph coupled to an Agilent 5977B mass spectrometer (Holmes et al., 2019. Science Signaling. 12, eaay3066).