My name is András and I’m a Principal Scientist at Moa, working on our TARGET platform.
Farmers are facing an ever-growing challenge of herbicide resistance today. With the number of currently available herbicide modes of action so limited, overuse of the same few types causes weeds to adapt to them and develop resistance, similar to how antibiotic resistance is an increasing challenge in healthcare. This is why Moa is looking for herbicides that work in a completely new way.
Once our GALAXY platform has identified a herbicide with a potentially novel mode of action and it shows promise in controlling weeds in our glasshouses, the work begins in earnest to pinpoint how it works. We have several biology platforms dedicated to this task, and one powerful method I have recently started using is proteomics.
Proteomics allows us to measure changes in the proteome (all the different proteins in an organism). Proteins do almost all of the functions within cells so an understanding of how the abundance of specific ones change will highlight which processes are impacted the most. This in turn gives me an insight into what is happening to plants when they are treated with a herbicide which brings us one step closer to figuring out its mode of action.
Above you can see a simplified output of proteomics. Three plants are treated differently, then all the different proteins (A-E) are measured to determine how the treatment impacted them. The effect can be quite varied: for example, protein abundance can decrease (B in treatment 1), increase (D in treatment 2) or even a completely new protein can be expressed in response to the treatment (E in treatment 2).
Proteomics is not without its challenges: for example, finding the right timepoints and doses for applying the herbicide to the plants can be difficult. When treated with a herbicide, plants get stressed and respond strongly by producing a broad range of proteins to help it survive. But this stress can mask the primary effect of the compound, making data analysis challenging, so we need to measure changes early enough for the herbicide to have some, but not too much of an effect on the plants.
This summer I took part in the Brixen Proteomics Summer School and presented our newest results, showcasing the strength of the proteomics approach for herbicide mode of action discovery.
One example that was presented was looking at the effects of paraquat, a commercial herbicide. In a very promising experiment, we were able to correctly identify chloroplasts and photosynthesis as the area most affected by this compound. To exploit the strengths of this method, we are also using proteomics as a tool for our advanced herbicide discovery projects to help them determine their mode of action and bring us one step closer to helping farmers deal with difficult to control weeds.
Of course, proteomics is not a silver bullet that will answer all of our mode of action questions. It certainly has its challenges, but it is proving to be an extremely powerful method for generating hypotheses on the mode of action of our new herbicide candidates, and I am very excited to see the results it will bring!
