Plant Metabolomics: Current Initiatives and Future Prospects

Abstract

Plant metabolomics is a rapidly advancing field of plant sciences and systems biology. It involves comprehensive analyses of small molecules (metabolites) in plant tissues and cells. These metabolites include a wide range of compounds, such as sugars, amino acids, organic acids, secondary metabolites (e.g., alkaloids and flavonoids), lipids, and more. Metabolomics allows an understanding of the functional roles of specific metabolites in plants’ physiology, development, and responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. It can lead to the identification of metabolites linked with specific traits or functions. Plant metabolic networks and pathways can be better understood with the help of metabolomics. Researchers can determine how plants react to environmental cues or genetic modifications by examining how metabolite profiles change under various crop stages. Metabolomics plays a major role in crop improvement and biotechnology. Integrating metabolomics data with other omics data (genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics) provides a more comprehensive perspective of plant biology. This systems biology approach enables researchers to understand the complex interactions within organisms.

Twenty Years of 1H NMR Plant Metabolomics: A Way Forward toward Assessment of Plant Metabolites for Constitutive and Inducible Defenses to Biotic Stress

“…This method would allow one to associate a variation of the level of metabolite with a specific region of the genome. 151 The field of NMR metabolomics is evolving, related to both hardware/instrument and software improvements. The likely advancements in NMR metabolomics will probably be driven by areas that have already widely adopted and extensively utilized the technique, such as clinical metabolomics.…”

“…Another interdisciplinary application could be a combination of NMR with molecular quantitative trait locus (mQTL). This method would allow one to associate a variation of the level of metabolite with a specific region of the genome …”