Abstract
As genomes of many plant species have been sequenced, demand for functional genomics has dramatically accelerated the improvement of other omics including metabolomics. Despite a large amount of metabolites still remaining to be identified, metabolomics has contributed significantly not only to the understanding of plant physiology and biology from the view of small chemical molecules that reflect the end point of biological activities, but also in past decades to the attempts to improve plant behavior under both normal and stressed conditions. Hereby, we summarize the current knowledge on the genetic and biochemical mechanisms underlying plant growth, development, and stress responses, focusing further on the contributions of metabolomics to practical applications in crop quality improvement and food safety assessment, as well as plant metabolic engineering. We also highlight the current challenges and future perspectives in this inspiring area, with the aim to stimulate further studies leading to better crop improvement of yield and quality.
Highlights
Plants produce large numbers of metabolites of diversified structures and abundance that play important roles in plant growth, development, and response to environments
A GWAS analysis using those metabolomic data obtained from 175 rice accessions successfully identified 323 associations between 143 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) and 89 secondary metabolites, which revealed two sorts of genetic machineries determining the natural variations in rice secondary metabolite compositions [48]
Plant metabolomics can help plant breeders to identify resistant biomarker metabolites that integrate the genetic background with the influence of the environment under stress conditions, and the selected biomarker may be used as a diagnostic metabolite for plant stress [62]
Summary
Plants produce large numbers of metabolites of diversified structures and abundance that play important roles in plant growth, development, and response to environments These diverse small molecular weight metabolites, the chemical base of crop yield and quality, are valuable nutrition and energy sources for human beings and live stocks [1]. Metabolomics is used to obtain a large amount of valuable information for the discovery of genes and pathways through accurate and high throughput corollary peak annotation via snapshotting the plant metabolome [14] It seems that there is a complicated regulatory network among these small molecules in plants, and by detecting the interactions among these metabolites, metabolomic analysis contributes significantly to the understanding of the relation between genotype and metabolic outputs by tackling key network components [15]. To comprehensively understand functional genomics regarding plant development, the importance of advanced tools of metabolomics, together with QTL (quantitative trait locus) analysis, GWAS (genome-wide association study), and knock-out/down technology, has been increasingly recognized within the plant science community
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