Burgess group research. Agri-Tech Catalyst The EdinOmics group, together with the Universities of Pretoria and Johannesburg and the Omnia Group, Ltd (the main South Africa-based fertilizer company), have been awarded an Agri-tech Catalyst Grant by Innovate UK/DFID for their project entitled “Novel plant-growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) for improved cultivation and nutrition of maize crops”.This project aims at developing PGPR-based biofertilizers for the South African staple crop maize, using metabolomics to assist in beneficial strain selection. By using our high-throughput metabolomic technology we will be able to characterise Omnia's plant-growth-promoting rhizobacterial strains to assess their output in terms of plant-growth promoting factors (such as plant hormones, siderophores, phosphate and nitrate carriers); and to analyse the effects of mixtures of these strains on the nutritional properties of maize in a field trial. Based on our findings, Omnia will be well placed to formulate an optimal sustainable biofertilizer for deployment throughout the Southern African region. Burgess Protocol Degradation of arable land due to overuse of chemical fertilizers results in loss of soil quality, soil fertility and beneficial microbial diversity. Plant-growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) represent a renewable, sustainable method of increasing crop yields and consequently improved nutritional status. Image Analysis of Historic Manuscripts Authentic historic manuscripts fetch high sums, but establishing their authenticity is challenging, relies on a host of stylistic clues and requires expert knowledge. High resolution mass spectrometry has not, until now, been applied to guide the authentication of historic manuscripts. Robert Burns is a well-known Scottish poet, whose fame, and the eponymous ‘Burns Night’ are celebrated world-wide. Authenticity of his works is complicated by the ‘industrial’ production of fakes by Alexander Smith in the 1890s, many of which were of good quality and capable of fooling experts. This study represents the first analysis of the inks and paper used in Burns poetry, in a minimally destructive manner that could find application in many areas. Applying direct infusion mass spectrometry to a panel of selected authenticated Burns and Smith manuscripts, we have produced a Support Vector Machine classifier that distinguishes Burns from Smith with a 0.77 AUC. Using contemporary recipes for inks, we were also able to match features of each to the inks used to produce some of Burns’ original manuscripts. We anticipate the method and classifier having broad application in authentication of manuscripts, and our analysis of contemporary inks to provide insights into the production of written works of art. MetaNetter 2 Metabolomics frequently relies on the use of high resolution mass spectrometry data. Classification and filtering of this data remain a challenging task due to the plethora of complex mass spectral artefacts, chemical noise, adducts and fragmentation that occur during ionisation and analysis. Additionally, the relationships between detected compounds can provide a wealth of information about the nature of the samples and the biochemistry that gave rise to them. We present a biochemical networking tool: MetaNetter 2 that is based on the original MetaNetter, a Cytoscape plugin that creates ab initio networks. The new version supports two major improvements: the generation of adduct networks and the creation of tables that map adduct or transformation patterns across multiple samples, providing a readout of compound relationships. We have applied this tool to the analysis of adduct patterns in the same sample separated under two different chromatographies, allowing inferences to be made about the effect of different buffer conditions on adduct detection, and the application of the chemical transformation analysis to both a single fragmentation analysis and an all-ions fragmentation dataset. Finally, we present an analysis of a dataset derived from anaerobic and aerobic growth of the organism Staphylococcus aureus demonstrating the utility of the tool for biological analysis. Related linksThe Scottish Metabolomics NetworkFlyMet.orgSoftware This article was published on 2025-05-19
