Plant metabolomics: A new frontier in phytochemical analysis

Abstract

The primary and secondary metabolites found in plant cells are the final recipients of biological information flow. In turn, their levels can influence gene expression and protein stability. Qualitative and quantitative measurements of these metabolites reflect the cellular state under defined conditions, and yield critical insights into the cellular processes that control the biochemical phenotype of the cell, tissue or whole organism. Metabolomics differs from traditional targeted phytochemical analysis in various fundamental aspects; for example, it is a data-driven approach with predictive power that aims to assess all measurable metabolites without any pre-conception or pre-selection. As such, metabolomics is providing new dimensions in the study of systems biology, enabling the in-depth understanding of the intra-and extracellular interactions of plant cells. Metabolomics is also developing into a valuable tool that can be used to monitor and assess gene function, and to characterise post-genomic processes from a broad perspective. Here, we give an overview of the fundamental analytical technologies and subsequent multivariate data analyses involved in plant metabolomics as a research tool to study various aspects of plant biology.

Food Metabolomics: A New Frontier in Food Analysis and its Application to Understanding Fermented Foods

“…Every metabolomics analysis consists of a sequence of steps prior to obtaining the data [16,19,24]. Not all the steps, depicted in Figure 2 are not, however, necessary for food metabolomics or any other metabolomics studies.…”

“…This might not be the case for untargeted analysis due to the need to target as many metabolites as possible. Extraction techniques commonly used for fermented foods are solvents (methanol, chloroform, ethanol, acetonitrile) [27,28,32], similar to those used in other metabolomics studies [15,17,24,31]. When the focus of the study is on specific nonvolatile metabolites, derivatization may be required prior to analysis on GC-MS.…”

“…Detection techniques include mass spectrometry (MS), NMR, high-resolution magic angle spinning (HRMAS) NMR, Fourier transform (FT) NMR, near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) [15,16,18,21]. A detailed review and working principle of these separation and detection techniques have been presented in the literature and can be consulted for further reading [15,18,21,24,30,31,34,35].…”

“…They are thus more detailed and require greater levels of extraction and purification prior to analysis. In contrast to targeted analysis, untargeted metabolomics analysis is broader and focused on the detection of a variety of metabolites to obtain fingerprints or patterns without essentially quantifying or identifying specific metabolites [16,23,24].…”

Comparative study of medicinal plants on feeding behaviour of seven day old larvae of Tobacco caterpillar, Spodoptera litura (Fab.) and Bihar hairy caterpillar, Spilarctia obliqua (Walk.)

“…These secondary metabolites such as terpenes, alkaloids, steroids, phenolics, tannins etc (Orozco et al, 2006, Mazid et al, 2011, Tugizimana, et al, 2013 have multiple modes of action and deleterious to insects in multiple ways, as acute toxicity, affecting insect behavior (Sanchez et al, 2010) disrupting growth and development of insects and acting as repellents, antifeedants and oviposition deterrents (Ullah et al, 2010). Now a day's indiscriminate use of synthetic insecticides creates a series of problems and in this situation introducing plant products can be a better alternative to synthetic chemical insecticides.…”