Abstract
Rapid, easy and reliable quantification of amino acids is crucial in research on plant amino acid metabolism and nutritional improvement of crops via enrichment of essential amino acids. A recently reported analysis method, based on solid phase extraction (SPE), derivatization with methyl chloroformate and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry was optimized and tested on three-week-old Arabidopsis thaliana leaf tissues. Optimization of the SPE cleanup yielded recovery rates of minimum 95% for all amino acids (except arginine). Variations in accuracy and precision did not exceed 12.5%, except for cysteine, histidine and tryptophane, which were excluded from analysis. Quantification of overlapping peaks for isoleucine/threonine and proline/asparagine was possible by selection of two specific fragment ions for each amino acid. Of the 16 selected amino acids, 14 were quantified successfully in at least 75% of the samples, while methionine and tyrosine were only quantifiable in 6% and 42%, respectively. A case study on the aspartate super pathway confirmed the applicability of the optimized method on wild type and genetically modified plants: external supplementation of methionine or lysine yielded a 146-fold or 27-fold increase in the respective absolute amino acid levels compared with the control treatment. Induced expression of dhdps-r1 (a mutated lysine biosynthesis gene encoding a feedback insensitive enzyme) caused an 83-fold increase in absolute lysine levels.
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