Biosynthesis of the phytohormone jasmonoyl-isoleucine (JA-Ile) requires reduction of the JA precursor 12-oxo-phytodienoic acid (OPDA) by OPDA reductase 3 (OPR3). Previous analyses of the opr3-1 Arabidopsis mutant suggested an OPDA signaling role independent of JA-Ile and its receptor COI1; however, this hypothesis has been challenged because opr3-1 is a conditional allele not completely impaired in JA-Ile biosynthesis. To clarify the role of OPR3 and OPDA in JA-independent defenses, we isolated and characterized a loss-of-function opr3-3 allele. Strikingly, opr3-3 plants remained resistant to necrotrophic pathogens and insect feeding, and activated COI1-dependent JA-mediated gene expression. Analysis of OPDA derivatives identified 4,5-didehydro-JA in wounded wild-type and opr3-3 plants. OPR2 was found to reduce 4,5-didehydro-JA to JA, explaining the accumulation of JA-Ile and activation of JA-Ile-responses in opr3-3 mutants. Our results demonstrate that in the absence of OPR3, OPDA enters the β-oxidation pathway to produce 4,5-ddh-JA as a direct precursor of JA and JA-Ile, thus identifying an OPR3-independent pathway for JA biosynthesis.

Jasmonates are lipid-derived plant hormones that regulate plant defenses and numerous developmental processes. Although the biosynthesis and molecular function of the most active form of the hormone, (+)-7-iso-jasmonoyl-L-isoleucine (JA-Ile), have been unraveled, it remains poorly understood how the diversity of bioactive jasmonates regulates such a multitude of plant responses. Bioactive analogs have been used as chemical tools to interrogate the diverse and dynamic processes of jasmonate action. By contrast, small molecules impairing jasmonate functions are currently unknown. Here, we report on jarin-1 as what is to our knowledge the first small-molecule inhibitor of jasmonate responses that was identified in a chemical screen using Arabidopsis thaliana. Jarin-1 impairs the activity of JA-Ile synthetase, thereby preventing the synthesis of the active hormone, JA-Ile, whereas closely related enzymes are not affected. Thus, jarin-1 may serve as a useful chemical tool in search for missing regulatory components and further dissection of the complex jasmonate signaling networks.

(+)-7-iso-Jasmonoyl-L-isoleucine (JA-Ile) regulates developmental and stress responses in plants. Its perception involves the formation of a ternary complex with the F-box COI1 and a member of the JAZ family of co-repressors and leads to JAZ degradation. Coronatine (COR) is a bacterial phytotoxin that functionally mimics JA-Ile and interacts with the COI1-JAZ co-receptor with higher affinity than JA-Ile. On the basis of the co-receptor structure, we designed ligand derivatives that spatially impede the interaction of the co-receptor proteins and, therefore, should act as competitive antagonists. One derivative, coronatine-O-methyloxime (COR-MO), has strong activity in preventing the COI1-JAZ interaction, JAZ degradation and the effects of JA-Ile or COR on several JA-mediated responses in Arabidopsis thaliana. Moreover, it potentiates plant resistance, preventing the effect of bacterially produced COR during Pseudomonas syringae infections in different plant species. In addition to the utility of COR-MO for plant biology research, our results underscore its biotechnological potential for safer and sustainable agriculture.

The plant hormone auxin regulates virtually every aspect of plant growth and development. Auxin acts by binding the F-box protein transport inhibitor response 1 (TIR1) and promotes the degradation of the AUXIN/INDOLE-3-ACETIC ACID (Aux/IAA) transcriptional repressors. Here we show that efficient auxin binding requires assembly of an auxin co-receptor complex consisting of TIR1 and an Aux/IAA protein. Heterologous experiments in yeast and quantitative IAA binding assays using purified proteins showed that different combinations of TIR1 and Aux/IAA proteins form co-receptor complexes with a wide range of auxin-binding affinities. Auxin affinity seems to be largely determined by the Aux/IAA. As there are 6 TIR1/AUXIN SIGNALING F-BOX proteins (AFBs) and 29 Aux/IAA proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana, combinatorial interactions may result in many co-receptors with distinct auxin-sensing properties. We also demonstrate that the AFB5–Aux/IAA co-receptor selectively binds the auxinic herbicide picloram. This co-receptor system broadens the effective concentration range of the hormone and may contribute to the complexity of auxin response.

Mass spectrometry is an important analytical technology for the identification of metabolites and small compounds by their exact mass. But dozens or hundreds of different compounds may have a similar mass or even the same molecule formula. Further elucidation requires tandem mass spectrometry, which provides the masses of compound fragments, but in silico fragmentation programs require substantial computational resources if applied to large numbers of candidate structures.We present and evaluate an approach to obtain candidates from a relational database which contains 28 million compounds from PubChem.A training phase associates tandem-MS peaks with corresponding fragment structures. For the candidate search, the peaks in a query spectrum are translated to fragment structures, and the candidates are retrieved and sorted by the number of matching fragment structures. In the cross validation the evaluation of the relative ranking positions (RRP) using different sizes of training sets confirms that a larger coverage of training data improves the average RRP from 0.65 to 0.72. Our approach allows downstream algorithms to process candidates in order of importance.

Hormone-triggered activation of the jasmonate signaling pathway in Arabidopsis thaliana requires SCFCOI1-mediated proteasome degradation of JAZ repressors. (−)-JA-L-Ile is the proposed bioactive hormone, and SCFCOI1 is its likely receptor. We found that the biological activity of (−)-JA-L-Ile is unexpectedly low compared to coronatine and the synthetic isomer (+)-JA-L-Ile, which suggests that the stereochemical orientation of the cyclopentanone-ring side chains greatly affects receptor binding. Detailed GC-MS and HPLC analyses showed that the (−)-JA-L-Ile preparations currently used in ligand binding studies contain small amounts of the C7 epimer (+)-7-iso-JA-L-Ile. Purification of each of these molecules demonstrated that pure (−)-JA-L-Ile is inactive and that the active hormone is (+)-7-iso-JA-L-Ile, which is also structurally more similar to coronatine. In addition, we show that pH changes promote conversion of (+)-7-iso-JA-L-Ile to the inactive (−)-JA-L-Ile form, thus providing a simple mechanism that can regulate hormone activity through epimerization.

The plant hormones are a structurally unrelated collection of small molecules derived from various essential metabolic pathways. These compounds are important regulators of plant growth and mediate responses to both biotic and abiotic stresses. During the last ten years there have been many exciting advances in our understanding of plant hormone biology, including new discoveries in the areas of hormone biosynthesis, transport, perception and response. Receptors for many of the major hormones have now been identified, providing new opportunities to study the chemical specificity of hormone signaling. These studies also reveal a surprisingly important role for the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway in hormone signaling. In addition, recent work confirms that hormone signaling interacts at multiple levels during plant growth and development. In the future, a major challenge will be to understand how the information conveyed by these simple compounds is integrated during plant growth.

2D-Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra are used in the (structural) analysis of small molecules. In contrast to 1D-NMR spectra, 2D-NMR spectra correlate the chemical shifts of 1H and 13C at the same time. A spectrum consists of several peaks in a two--dimensional space. The most important information of a peak is the location of its center, which captures the bonding relationships of hydrogen and carbon atoms. A spectrum contains much information about the chemical structure of a product, but in most cases the structure cannot be read off in a simple and straightforward manner. Structure elucidation involves a considerable amount (manual) efforts.Using high-field NMR spectrometers, many 2D-NMR spectra can be recorded in short time. So the common situation is that a lab or company has a repository of 2D-NMR spectra, partially annotated with the structural information. For the remaining spectra the structure in unknown. In case two research labs are collaborating, the repositories will be merged and annotations shared.We reduce that problem to the task of finding duplicates in a given set of 2D-NMR spectra. Therefore, we propose a simple but robust definition of 2D-NMR duplicates, which allows for small measurement errors. We give a quadratic algorithm for the problem, which can be implemented in SQL. Further, we analyze a more abstract class of heuristics, which are based on selecting particular peaks. Such a heuristic works as a filter step on the pairs of possible duplicates and allows false positives. We compare all methods with respect to their run time. Finally we discuss the effectiveness of the duplicate definition on real data.

We are developing a vendor-independent archive and on top of that a data warehouse for mass spectrometry metabolomics data. The archive schema resembles the communitydeveloped object model, the Java implementation of the model classes, and an editor (for both mzData XML files and the database) have been generated using the Eclipse Modeling Framework. Persistence is handled by the JDO2 -compliant framework JPOX. The main content of the Data Warehouse are the results of the signal processing and peak-picking tasks, carried out using the XCMS package from Bioconductor, putative identification and mass decomposition are added to the warehouse afterwards.We present the system architecture, current content, performance observations and describe the analysis tools on top of the warehouse.Availability: http://msbi.ipb-halle.de/