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Testing the boundaries of closely related daisy taxa using metabolomic profiling

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journal contribution
posted on 2014-04-28, 00:00 authored by A Messina, Damien CallahanDamien Callahan, N G Walsh, S E Hoebee, P T Green
Advances in high-throughput, comprehensive small molecule analytical techniques have seen the development of the field of metabolomics. The coupling of mass spectrometry with high-resolution chromatography provides extensive chemical profiles from complex biological extracts. These profiles include thousands of compounds linked to gene expression, and can be used as taxonomic characters. Studies have shown metabolite profiles to be taxon specific in a range of organisms, but few have investigated taxonomically problematic plant taxa. This study used a phenetic analysis of metabolite profiles to test taxonomic boundaries in the Olearia phlogopappa (Asteraceae) complex as delimited by morphological data. Metabolite profiles were generated from both field- and shade house-grown material, using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Aligned profiles of 51 samples from 12 taxa gave a final dataset of over 10,000 features. Multivariate analyses of field and shade house material gave congruent results, both confirming the distinctiveness of the morphologically defined species and subspecies in this complex. Metabolomics has great potential in alpha taxonomy, especially for testing the boundaries of closely related taxa where DNA sequence data has been uninformative.

History

Journal

Taxon

Volume

63

Issue

2

Pagination

367 - 376

Publisher

International Association for Plant Taxonomy

Location

Utrecht, The Netherlands

ISSN

0040-0262

Language

eng

Publication classification

C Journal article; C1.1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2014, International Association for Plant Taxonomy