Overview of Services

The Center for Agricultural and Life Sciences Metabolomics (CALM) is a fee-based service center that provides analytical services for a wide range of biochemical metabolites using liquid and gas chromatography. Examples of analytical services available include fatty acids, lipids, waxes, cutin monomers, amino acids, sugars, plant hormones, cannabinoids, alkaloids, and vitamins.  Analysis of new metabolites can be developed as needed.

Contact Information

Before submitting samples for analysis, please contact Pradeep Kachroo or Keshun Yu via email or phone for details on sample preparation and fee schedule.

Our facility is located at the following address:

Center For Agricultural and Life Sciences Metabolomics (CALM)
Room 113 Plant Science Building
1405 Veterans Drive
Lexington, KY 40546-0312

Staffing

Pradeep Kachroo is a Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at University of Kentucky. His personal research program concerns how specific signaling pathways in plants are induced during host-pathogen interaction, how these pathways communicate with each other, and the molecular, genetic, and biochemical mechanisms underlying such regulations.

Phone: 859-218-0729

e-mail: pk62@uky.edu

Keshun Yu, along with Pradeep Kachroo, is responsible for day-to-day operation of the facility. Keshun Yu has extensive experience in the design and implementation of analytical protocols for analyzing plant metabolites.

Phone: 859-218-0786

e-mail: kyu0@uky.edu

Huazhen Liu has extensive experience in the design and implementation of analytical protocols for analyzing plant and non-plant metabolites on LC, LC-MS and GC-MS platforms, including volatile profiling. She is also well versed with targeted and untargeted metabolomics.

e-mail: huazhen.liu@uky.edu

John K. Johnson helps maintain our instrumentation; he also develops and performs tests for standards and prepared samples in order to establish analytical programs for each metabolite and instrument pair.

e-mail: john.johnson@uky.edu

Aardra Kachroo is a Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology, University of Kentucky. Her research program studies local and systemic defense responses against viral, bacterial, and fungal pathogens. On-going projects are focused on understanding role of chemical in local and systemic immunity, identifying and characterizing plant targets of microbial effectors and understanding the overlap in responses induced by pathogenic versus beneficial microorganisms. 

e-mail: aardra.kachroo@uky.edu

Sample Preparation

Sample preparation is an integral step in the analytical protocol, and will depend upon the specific metabolite analysis and the specific sample material.

The options for completing this step are:

• Our laboratory completes the sample preparation in our facility (additional cost) or
• Investigators can complete the sample preparation in their own laboratory. With this option, our facility can either
  - Provide sample preparation protocol details and guidance or
  - Offer training in sample preparation techniques

Specific Services

We can perform quantitative measurements of the analytes listed in the following table using GC, GC-MS or HPLC.  Analyses for new metabolites can be developed as needed.

Instruments

• Six Agilent GC-MS systems 
• Two Agilent GC systems fitted with Flame Ionization Detectors 
• Agilent 1260 Infinity HPLC with UV, FLD, RI and ELSD Detectors
• Agilent 1290 UHPLC with 6546 quadrupole-time of light mass spectrometer 
• Data Analysis Software: Agilent MassHunter Workstation for qualitative and quantitative analyses (Version 11.0); Agilent Enhanced MassHunter Workstation (Version 11.0) for data acquisition; NIST MS spectral library.

Center's Steering Committee

• Gang Chen (UK-Medical Center)
• Robert Hirsch (UK- Director Undergraduate education)
• Keshun Yu (UK- Lab Manager, CALM)
• Pat Calie (Eastern Kentucky University)
• Pradeep Kachroo (UK- Plant Pathology)