With close to 80% of fresh water in the United States being utilized for agriculture, it is necessary to improve the water use efficiency of crops in order to reduce competition for this precious resource between rural and urban communities. Sorghum is a phenotypically diverse crop used as a biofuel, grain, forage or for sugar production. In part due to its status as a C4 plant, sorghum displays significant drought tolerance. Here, we plan to use Metabolic Flux Analysis (MFA) in order to develop a model of carbon flux in sorghum primary metabolism. MFA integrates a computational model of metabolism with experimental tracer data to determine carbon flux. Challenges in model building include accounting for the two distinct cell types characteristic of C4 photosynthesis, which add complexity to already published C3 models. To perform isotopically non-stationary (INST)-MFA, we will feed isotopically labeled 13CO2 to sorghum leaves and take metabolite samples at short intervals in order to quantify 13C enrichment in primary metabolites over time. We will then integrate this data with the computational model in order to generate flux distributions representative of in vivo measurements. Progress toward developing INST-MFA for sorghum will be discussed.

Using metabolic flux analysis to analyze carbon flux in the C4, drought-tolerant crop sorghum

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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