Articles

Plant breeding should be able to enhance yield, nutritional and stress resistance. Comprehensive profiling of small molecules is called metabolomics which joins genotype, environment and phenotype and therefore becomes an irreplaceable toolkit in the study of plant genetics and crop enhancement. Hundreds of thousands of primary and secondary metabolites are found in plant tissues and it has been estimated that plant metabolome has over 200 000 compounds, though only a small fraction of these have been deposited in publicly accessible databases. It is now feasible to identify thousands of metabolite features using the high throughput platforms including gas chromatology mass spectrometry (GC MS), liquid chromatology mass spectrometry (LC MS), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and capillary electrophoresis mass spectrometry (CE MS) although the metabolite identification continues to act as a bottleneck. Untargeted LC MS data sets normally annotate 2 to 15 percent of detected peaks.