Metabolomic Approaches in Plant Research

Metabolomics is an emerging approach in the realm of omics. Despite its rapid emergence two decades ago, it has already proven an impressive potential in improving traits related to agriculture. This chapter will help readers to familiarize with plant metabolites and their importance in plants and analytical techniques used in metabolomics and computational metabolomics (from digital recording of spectra to their identification as well as quantification). Web tools, software, and metabolome databases commonly used for plant metabolomics are summarized. We also discussed progress in the field of metabolomics data integration with related “omics” fields, particularly functional genomics. Challenges faced by agricultural metabolomics along with future research avenues to combat hunger (in terms of both quality and quantity) are described.