Plant metabolomics and its applications

In post genomics era, metabolomics has developed to an accepted and valuable tool in life sciences. Metabolomics (the metabolic profiling of an organism in response to biotic and abiotic stressors) generate information on physiological function and pathological dysfunction to provide a metabolic trajectory, giving a holistic picture of integrated biological function over time It deals with the identification, qualitative and quantitative measurement of the metabolites acting in the biochemical network and bridges the gap between genomics and proteomics. Now metabolomics can be run routinely and data successfully used to investigate genotype-phenotype relations. Applications of metabolomics lie in functional genomics, integration of proteome and metabolome, metabotyping of genotypes by biochemical phenotypes, population screening of genotypes, understanding physiological processes, developing biomarkers of resistance, quality breeding, explaining systems biology and ultimately in chemical engineering of plant with known biochemical architecture to produce quality and functional food.