Specificities of metabolite profiles in alpine plants

Abstract

Given that plants cannot escape their environment, they have evolved many strategies to survive, grow, and reproduce, including the capability to synthesise over 200,000 specialized and highly variable metabolites (Yonekura-Sakakibara and Saito 2009). In the severe alpine environment plants experience particularly low and high temperature extremes, intense solar radiation under clear conditions, strong wind effects, and variable mean dates for snow melting depending on slope and exposure (Körner 2003). Demanding environmental conditions have long been shown to exert a profound influence on the soluble metabolite composition of plants, although plants from high elevation habitats have been poorly analysed (Harborne 1982; Alonso-Amelot 2008).