Abstract
Modern ‘metabolomic’ methods allow us to compare levels of many structurally diverse compounds in an automated fashion across a large number of samples. This technology is ideally suited to screening of populations of plants, including trials where the aim is the determination of unintended effects introduced by GM. A number of metabolomic methods have been devised for the determination of substantial equivalence. We have developed a methodology, using [1H]-NMR fingerprinting, for metabolomic screening of plants and have applied it to the study of substantial equivalence of field-grown GM wheat. We describe here the principles and detail of that protocol as applied to the analysis of flour generated from field plots of wheat. Particular emphasis is given to the downstream data processing and comparison of spectra by multivariate analysis, from which conclusions regarding metabolome changes due to the GM can be assessed against the background of natural variation due to environment.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Professor Peter Shewry (Rothamsted Research) for the provision of samples of wheat flour. The work was funded by the Food Standards Agency under their G02 programme and the BBSRC under the GARNet and MeT-RO projects. Rothamsted Research receives grant-aided support from the BBSRC.
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© 2009 Humana Press, a part of Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Beale*, M., Ward, J., Baker, J. (2009). Establishing Substantial Equivalence: Metabolomics. In: Jones, H., Shewry, P. (eds) Transgenic Wheat, Barley and Oats. Methods in Molecular Biology™, vol 478. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-379-0_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-379-0_17
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