Identification of Subcellular, Structural, and Metabolic Changes Through NMR

Abstract

Secondary metabolites are unique sources for flavors, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, and industrial bioactive molecules which are biosynthesized in different plant tissues. These metabolites play a major role in the adaptation of plants to the prevailing environment, in overcoming stress conditions, and in defense to several unforeseen invasions. Identifying the biological components and their functions and multiple interactions between components to understand the cellular metabolism of a cell to meet its fluctuating demand for energy and materials has remained a challenging task. Based on traditional metabolic analysis, mapping of intracellular fluxes in metabolic networks is only possible with high-throughput techniques. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a powerful and versatile tool that can provide information on the metabolites and their metabolic network. NMR has played a dominant role in the identification of an array of compounds from diverse environments and diverse ecogeographic domains. Plant biotic relationships which include host plant interaction and resistance for an eco-metabolomics have been developed with NMR approach. NMR can also be used to determine low-resolution structures of target–ligand complexes for natively unstructured proteins or membrane proteins that are not amenable to crystallographic approaches.