Metabolomic Profiling of Plants to Understand Reasons for Plant Stress Resilience to Abiotic Stress

Abstract

In the constantly changing environment, plants are exposed to various adverse stress conditions such as drought, cold, salinity and flooding. These stresses influence the plant growth and overall crop productivity. Plants have evolved a series of mechanisms for responding to these stresses over a long period during evolution. Under abiotic stress, plant metabolism is disturbed. The reconfiguration of metabolic networks of plant must happen under stress conditions to allow both the maintenance of metabolic homeostasis and the production of compounds that ameliorate the stress. This metabolic reprogramming is necessary to meet the demand of various anti-stress agents. Large scale analysis of highly complex mixtures of metabolites are made possible by a series of integrated technologies and methodologies, like non-destructive NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy), mass spectrometry (MS) based methods including GC-MS (gas chromatography-MS), LC-MS (liquid chromatography-MS) and CE-MS (capillary electrophoresis-MS). The development and adoption of metabolomics and related approaches enable us to gain a comprehensive overview of the plant metabolic response to abiotic stresses.