Center for Agricultural and Life Science Metabolomics (CALM)

The University of Kentucky (UK) is one of the eight universities in the united states that has colleges of agriculture, engineering, medicine and pharmacy on a single campus, leading to unique interdisciplinary collaborations. UK consists of 17 academic and professional colleges that offer more than 200 major and degree programs at undergraduate and graduate levels. The UKs College of Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAFE) serves the land-grant mission of research, education extension and outreach, which are networked to the state''s 120 counties through the Kentucky Cooperative Extension Services. To promote graduate, undergraduate and high-school education, while maintaining cutting-edge research, we have established an analytical core in the plant science building that houses several gas and liquid chromatography (LC) units. However, our progress is severely limited by unavailability of LC-mass spectrometry (MS) unit that can cater to the needs of CAFE researchers. We propose to purchase an Agilent ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) unit fitted with a 6546 single quadrupole-time-of-flight-MS (TOF-MS). The UHPLC-TOF-MS will become part of the analytical core facility located in the Plant Science building (PSB) that is currently used by researchers from plant and soil Sciences, plant pathology, horticulture and entomology departments. Like other analytical facilities in this core, UHPLC-TOFMS system will be available to other CAFE researchers as well as to faculty from College of Engineering and Biology. The UHPLC-TOF-MS will also be used for two undergraduate experiential learning courses: ABT 395 (required independent research experiences class for ABT majors) and BIO199 (research experiences class for freshman in the STEMcats program) as well as for high-school education. Acquisition of UHPLC-TOF-MS will provide essential access to stateof- the-art analytical analysis for the research community at UK.