Metabolomics and complementary techniques to investigate the plant phytochemical cosmos

Abstract

Plants and their associated microbial communities are known to produce millions of metabolites, a majority of which are still not characterized and will be illuminated by the advance of metabolomics and the informatics techniques.

In situnet fishing of α-glucosidase inhibitors from evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) defatted seeds by combination of LC-MS/MS, molecular networking, affinity-based ultrafiltration, and molecular docking

“…With the rapid development of new technologies and new materials in the field of analytical chemistry, the analysis of phytochemicals in complex extracts can be achieved in a more comprehensive, automatic, rapid, accurate, and trace manner. 21,22 However, in situ recognition of bioactive phytochemicals for specific targets is still a key problem in food analysis. Nowadays, some new techniques are being proposed for the recognition of novel phytochemicals for specific targets in natural product extracts without purification, such as ligand-fishing, metabonomics, etc .…”

An Integrated NMR, LC-DAD-MS, LC-QTOF Metabolomic Characterization of Sartoria hedysaroides: Correlation of Antioxidant and Enzyme Inhibitory Activity with Chemical Composition by Multivariate Data Analysis

“…On the other hand, high resolution mass spectra obtained with Q-TOF allowed us to calculate the molecular formula of each constituent. Overall, the combination of data obtained from the two platforms allowed us to perform the putative identification of the chemical constituents in the extracts (level 2 identification, as proposed by the metabolomics standards initiative [ 17 , 18 ]) ( Table 3 , Table 4 and Table 5 ).…”

Metabolite annotation from knowns to unknowns through knowledge-guided multi-layer metabolic network

“…The metabolome refers to the complete collection of small molecules in living organisms [1][2][3][4] . It includes not just endogenously produced known metabolites from cellular metabolism, but also unknown metabolites generated from microbiota, plants, foods and xenobiotics 3,5,6 . Liquid chromatography -mass spectrometry (LC-MS) based untargeted metabolomics allows to measure thousands of metabolic features from biological samples 7,8 .…”

“…Significant efforts were made in the past decades to expand the coverage of spectral libraries. For annotation of unknown metabolites, due to lacking the knowledge of chemical structures, additional experiments or in-silico tools were generally required 5,11 . For example, Tsugawa and colleagues employed the stable-isotope labeling to determine formulas of unknown metabolites through identifying the labeled and non-labeled pair of metabolic peaks 14 .…”