Search bioRxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/bioRxiv

bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.04.17.719198

Metabolic fingerprinting of 17 Brassicaceae species across three tissues

Wolters, F. C.·Woldu Semere, T.·Schranz, M. E.·Medema, M. H.·Bouwmeester, K.·van der Hooft, J. J. J.
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Plants produce the most diverse blends of specialized metabolites on earth. Natural products derived from plants are valuable resources for drug development, food chemistry, and crop resistance breeding. Phenotypes of specialized metabolite profiles can be captured by untargeted mass-spectrometry across species phylogeny, tissues, and genotypes. Here, we collected metabolic fingerprints of 17 Brassicaceae species across three tissues (paired leaf and root; flower) using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) in positive and negative ionization mode. Corresponding metadata has been refined for reuse according to ReDU guidelines, and for integration with public genomic and transcriptomic data. Standardization of in vitro growth conditions, and data processing workflows enables integration of acquired raw and processed data across platforms for single- and multi-omics analysis. Further, the inclusion of tissue-specific metabolic profiles across ploidy levels, as well as across crop species and wild relatives, makes this dataset a valuable resource for natural product discovery.

Explore related subjects

plant biologyPreprint

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Wolters, F. C., Woldu Semere, T., Schranz, M. E., Medema, M. H., Bouwmeester, K., van der Hooft, J. J. J.. 2026-04-21. Metabolic fingerprinting of 17 Brassicaceae species across three tissues. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.17.719198

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

bioRxiv2026

Combined heat and drought stress alters chromatin accessibility and primes potato abscisic acid biosynthesis

Due to climate change, abiotic stresses get increasingly more frequent, in a combined and recurrent manner in the same growing season. Chromatin accessibility enables efficient responses to combined stress and priming for reoccurring stresses. To study the regulatory basis of priming, we profiled chromatin accessibility and gene expression in leaves of two genetically distinct potato cultivars after prolonged heat, drought, waterlogging, and combined heat and drought. We show that most accessibility changes are stress-specific, however, drought stress elicits a distinct transcriptional response as compared to combined heat and drought stress, with strong chaperone induction and dampened abscisic acid signalling, despite water deficit. A second cycle of combined stress reveals transcriptional memory of abscisic acid biosynthesis gene StNCED3 and its transcriptional activator StWRKY33b, providing a new mechanistic insight of abiotic stress memory in a staple crop important for global food security.

plant biology↗
bioRxiv2026

High-throughput microarray analysis provides new insight into optimising Rubisco yield from diverse plants

Interest in plant-based proteins is increasing due to environmental, ethical, and health considerations. Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (Rubisco), the most abundant protein on Earth, is present in all green leafy biomass and possesses excellent nutritional and functional properties. Despite its potential, Rubisco remains underutilised because extraction methods are often costly, inefficient, and influenced by species-specific differences. Moreover, the impact on Rubisco yield of cell wall-protein interactions remains poorly understood. We applied Microarray Polymer Profiling (MAPP), a high-throughput platform for simultaneous polysaccharide and protein mapping, to characterise diverse leafy biomass sources. This approach revealed interspecies variation and glycan-protein interactions that influence protein extractability and these insights inform biomass selection and optimisation of extraction protocols to improve Rubisco yield. MAPP was also used to evaluate the effects of carbohydrate-active enzymes on Rubisco recovery through targeted cell wall modification.

plant biology↗
bioRxiv2026

Leaf ionomic stability shapes drought adaptation in pearl millet

Pearl millet is a staple cereal of semi-arid West Africa, where early-season water deficit constrains vegetative establishment and yield. While the genetic architecture of the pearl millet foliar ionome has been characterised under well-watered conditions, how this ionome reorganises under drought, and whether this reorganisation has a distinct genetic basis, remains unknown. We profiled the drought-response of 17 foliar elements in 175 diverse pearl millet inbred lines over two seasons in Senegal. The foliar concentration of two co-regulated groups of elements changed reproducibly under early water stress across both years. Leaf ion stability, rather than plasticity, was associated with the maintenance of flowering time and plant biomass, suggesting that drought adaptation in pearl millet relies more on ionomic stability than on adaptive shifts in elemental composition. Among the 17 elements, only potassium showed a significant genotype-by-treatment interaction suggesting that genetic variation contributes to differences in potassium response to drought. Genome-wide association mapping on potassium plasticity in response to drought identified a locus, designated qKP-6, that limits potassium depletion under stress without penalising constitutive potassium levels. This locus represents a candidate region for the genetic control of potassium plasticity under drought. This work provides new insights into the genetic control of mineral nutrition under water deficit in pearl millet, and highlights leaf potassium concentration as a genetically controlled component of drought-responsive ionomic variation with potential implications for drought tolerance.

plant biology↗