Deep profiling of plant stress biomarkers following bacterial pathogen infection with protein corona based nano-omics

Detection and remediation of stress in crops is vital to ensure agricultural productivity. Conventional forms of assessing stress in plants are limited by feasibility, delayed phenotypic responses, inadequate specificity, and lack of sensitivity during initial phases of stress. While mass spectrometry is remarkably precise and achieves high-resolution, complex samples, such as plant tissues, require time-consuming and biased depletion strategies to effectively identify low-abundant stress biomarkers. Here, we bypassed these reduction methods via a nano-omics approach, where gold nanoparticles were used to enrich time- and temperature-dependent stress-related proteins through biomolecular corona formation that were subsequently analyzed by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS). This nano-omic approach was more effective than a conventional proteomic analysis using UHPLC- MS/MS for resolving biotic-stress induced responses at early stages of pathogen infection in Arabidopsis thaliana, well before the development of visible phenotypic symptoms, as well as in distal tissues of pathogen infected plants at early timepoints. The enhanced sensitivity of this nano-omic approach enables the identification of stress-related proteins at early critical timepoints, providing a more nuanced understanding of plant-pathogen interactions that can be leveraged for the development of early intervention strategies for sustainable agriculture.