Plant Metabolomics Reviews

As diets shift globally toward plant-based foods, objective tools are needed to monitor intake and evaluate the resulting health outcomes. Biomarkers of dietary exposure offer complementary objective measurements for self-reported dietary assessment methods. Recent developments of mass spectrometry-based metabolomics have enabled the discovery of many emerging biomarkers for plant-based foods; yet a substantial gap remains between discovery and clinical application. This narrative review...

INTRODUCTION: The soils of subtropical forests are generally limited by P availability, and over time the P limitation experienced by the tree species becomes increasingly severe. The plasticity of leaf traits and the reprogramming of metabolites are strategies for plants to adapt to environmental stress, including P limitation. However, research that link the plasticity of leaf traits, gene regulation, and metabolism to reveal the adaptive survival mechanisms to P limitation is still relatively...

CONCLUSION: SSW alleviated CSD-associated behavioral abnormalities, tissue injury, and inflammation, with the high dose showing the most consistent effects. These improvements were accompanied by changes in gut microbial composition and SCFA profiles.

Plants produce a multifunctional assortment of specialized metabolites that play important roles in defense, environmental adaptation, and ecological interactions. Among these compounds, acylsugars, nonvolatile metabolites produced primarily in glandular trichomes of Solanaceae species, have emerged as informative model systems for understanding plant surface chemistry. Differences in acyl chain length, branching pattern, saturation, and attachment position generate extensive chemical diversity...

Abiotic stresses, which are intensified by climate change and human activities, including drought, salinity, extreme temperatures, heavy metals, and nutrient deficiencies, pose severe threat to global food security, reducing crop yields by up to 70% annually. Conventional breeding and chemical interventions have provided solutions but remain limited by cost, time, and genetic constraints, bolstering the need for advanced molecular approaches. Emerging multi-omics approaches including...

Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) is a vital crop for food security, nutrition, and climate resilience in sub-Saharan African and other semi-arid regions. However, its improvement is constrained by the complexity of polygenic traits such as drought tolerance, pest resistance, and seed quality. Conventional breeding, while foundational, remains insufficient to address these challenges at the required pace. Recent advances in multi-omics technologies, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and...

Classical plant immunity models rely on pattern-triggered immunity (PTI) and effector-triggered immunity (ETI), yet these frameworks largely overlook the rhizosphere microbiome as a functional determinant of disease resistance. Plants act as holobionts, their root exudates comprising flavonoids, coumarins, benzoxazinoids, strigolactones, and primary metabolites selectively recruit microbial communities whose composition is shaped by host genotype and dynamically reprogrammed under biotic and...

Plant biostimulants have emerged as transformative and sustainable tools for improving crop productivity, resource-use efficiency, and resilience under rapidly intensifying environmental stresses. Unlike conventional agrochemicals, biostimulants function by activating physiological, biochemical, and molecular processes that optimize plant performance without directly supplying nutrients or exerting pesticidal effects. This review comprehensively examines the integrated roles of plant-derived and...

Preparations of Echinacea purpurea vary in biological effects according to plant organ, cultivation conditions, extraction procedure, and phytochemical profile. This structured critical narrative review integrates analytical, preclinical, and clinical evidence on the phytochemical diversity and preparation-dependent activities of E. purpurea, with particular emphasis on caffeic acid derivatives, alkamides, polysaccharides, flavonoids, and volatile constituents. The literature published from...

Aconitum L. species are widely recognized for their highly bioactive diterpenoid alkaloids, which contribute to their therapeutic potential and substantial toxicity. While Asian and European Aconitum species have been extensively studied in traditional medicine, phytochemistry, pharmacology, and toxicology, North American species remain comparatively underexplored. This review examines the ethnobotanical records, phytochemical data, toxicological mechanisms, and reported biological activities of...

Alkaloid biosynthesis is a central topic in plant specialized metabolism because many alkaloids have ecological, pharmacological, and biotechnological relevance. Isoquinoline alkaloids (IAs) and Amaryllidaceae alkaloids (AAs) are both connected to aromatic amino acid metabolism, but they differ in taxonomic distribution, scaffold-forming chemistry, pathway resolution, and biotechnological development. This review compares the historical and methodological trajectories that have shaped IA and AA...

Juniperus species are a rich source of pharmacologically important secondary metabolites, including terpenoids, lignans, flavonoids, and phenolic compounds. However, the commercial utilization of these metabolites is limited by the plant's slow growth, poor natural regeneration, and environmental variability affecting metabolite accumulation. Integrating plant tissue culture with elicitation strategies is a promising approach for sustainably producing these valuable compounds. This review...

Heat stress is a primary environmental constraint on chili pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) productivity and fruit quality across global agricultural systems. Elevated temperatures adversely affect plant growth, flowering, fruit set, pod morphology, physiology, and metabolism. The severity of these impacts varies with the duration and intensity of heat exposure and with the stage of plant development. Reproductive development is especially vulnerable, resulting in compromised fruit formation and a...

Phytoplasmas are wall-less, phloem-restricted bacterial pathogens that infect over 1,000 plant species, causing substantial losses in agriculture, horticulture, and forestry worldwide. Despite their reduced genomes and limited metabolic autonomy, these obligate parasites colonize diverse hosts through secreted effector proteins that extensively reprogram plant development, metabolism, immune signalling, and vector interactions. Advances in genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and...

Wheat resilience depends on coordinated signaling, reproductive protection, and source-sink regulation, providing a framework to breed robust trait combinations that stabilize yield under combined heat and drought. Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of heat and drought events, posing a major threat to wheat productivity, yield stability, and food security. Because these stresses often coincide in the field, their combined effects can impair growth, reproductive development,...

Heavy metal contamination is a major environmental constraint that negatively affects plant growth, metabolism, and agricultural productivity. Excess metals such as cadmium, lead, and copper disturb cellular functions mainly by inducing oxidative stress, disrupting nutrient balance, and causing toxicity at multiple levels of organization. To cope with these stresses, plants activate complex defense systems, among which melatonin (MT) (N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine) has recently emerged as a key...

Global climate change and shrinking freshwater supplies threaten agricultural sustainability. A major translational bottleneck exists: drought-tolerant genotypes developed in labs often fail in open-field conditions due to phenotypic mismatch. Traditional single-gene approaches and static lab tests overlook genotype-by-environment (G × E) interactions, hormonal tradeoffs (involving Abscisic Acid, Jasmonic Acid, Brassinosteroids, and Melatonin), and artificial effects of pots. This review...

Metabolic bioengineering has emerged as a transformative approach for reshaping plant defense by targeting intrinsic biosynthetic pathways to enhance immunity in modern agriculture. Moving beyond proof-of-concept metabolomics to broad-spectrum programmable pathway engineering addresses gaps in plant rational design and optimizes resilience in response to diverse environmental cues. This review aims to comprehensively highlight the transition of innovative approaches to phenolics, alkaloids,...

This review synthesizes the molecular mechanisms of cold tolerance in pepper, integrating multi-omics data,genome editing, and precision breeding strategies to accelerate the development of cold-resilient cultivars. Cold stress is a significant environmental factor that affects the growth, productivity, and fruit quality of Capsicum annuum by impairing membrane integrity photosynthesis and cellular redox homeostasis. Although pepper has several endogenous cold-responsive regulators such as...

Organisms vary in their lifespan. Understanding this variation may help us live healthier and longer. Here, we focus on species living twice as long as humans, or more. Out of the 101 multicellular species with a maximum lifespan of 250+ years, 11 are animals and 90 are plants. We surveyed the genetic, transcriptional, proteomic, metabolomic, regeneration-, stress-, and cancer-related components of intraspecific and interspecific lifespan variation, across these species. We examined whether the...