Abstract
Plant hormones play an important role as signaling molecules in the regulation of almost all phases of plant development, from embryogenesis to senescence. As well as metabolome and transcriptome, introduction of omics approach into hormone research will give us the clues for deeply understanding the regulation of hormone action and metabolism. We have developed a highly sensitive and high-throughput method for the simultaneous analysis of 45 molecular species of cytokinins, auxins, ABA, gibberellins (GAs), Jasmonic acid, and salicylic acid using an automatic liquid handling system for solid phase extraction, UPLC-ESI-qMS/MS, and chemical derivatization with bromocholine. Our current method needs less than 100 mg (fresh weight) of plant tissues to determine phytohormone profiles and enables us to analyze simultaneously more than 180 plant samples. Application of this method to plant hormone profiling enabled us to draw organ-distribution maps of hormone species in rice and Arabidopsis.