Current analytical technologies and bioinformatic resources for plant metabolomics data

Abstract

Plant metabolome as the downstream product in the biological information of flow starting from genomics is highly complex, and dynamically produces a wide range of primary and secondary metabolites, including ionic inorganic compounds, hydrophilic carbohydrates, amino acids, organic compounds, and compounds associated with hydrophobic lipids. The complex metabolites present in biological samples bring challenges to analytical tools for separating and characterization of the metabolites. Analytical tools such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and mass spectrometry have recently facilitated the separation, characterization, and quantification of diverse chemical structures. The massive amount of data generated from these analytical tools need to be handled using fast and accurate bioinformatics tools and databases. In this review, we focused on plant metabolomics data acquisition using various analytical tools and freely available workflows from raw data to meaningful biological data to help biologists and chemists to move at the same pace as computational biologists.