Chapter 1 - Advancement of Metabolomics Techniques and Their Applications in Plant Science: Current Scenario and Future Prospective

Abstract

Metabolomics is the study of the whole metabolome of an organism and it provide a comprehensive knowledge of the metabolite composition of the biological system. Metabolomics techniques have been applied in numerous areas such as functional genomics, pharmaceutical and medical research, and natural product discovery, and new applications are continuously being explored. In recent years, plant metabolomics gained significant importance and upgraded to an active field of implementation of metabolomics techniques. Metabolite profiling of the plants is a rapidly growing technology for phenotyping and diagnostic analyses of the plants and is used to acquire comprehensive information on metabolites. Plant metabolomics plays an important role in bridging the phenotype–genotype gap and thus assisting the functional annotation of the knowledge gained from genomics. Because of the great chemical complexity of the plant metabolome, the study of plant natural extracts requires sophisticated, advanced analytical methods. Various hyphenated metabolomics techniques such as liquid chromatography (LC)-mass spectrometry (MS), gas chromatography (GC)-MS, and LC-nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), as well as many advanced data processing methods have been developed. Plant metabolomics has diverse applications, and it is getting more advanced by the advancement of various metabolomic platforms. Implementation of these techniques gives a more detail information of biological events than transcriptomics and proteomics. Therefore these techniques are employed to decipher the complexity of the complex natural products, for quality control of the crop plants, and to study the response of plants to various abiotic stresses. Along with the various hyphenated methods, different multidimensional and fast metabolomics approach have also been introduced to get a better understanding of the plant metabolite profile under natural as well as in stress conditions. In this chapter, recent developments in various hyphenated metabolomics techniques like LC-MS, GC-MS, and LC-NMR, as well as direct injection methods such as NMR and direct inject mass spectrophotometry (DIMS) along with various ultrafast metabolomics methods have been discussed.