THE ROLE OF METABOLOMICS IN MEDICINAL PLANT SCIENCE

Today’s innovative technologies enable comprehensive screening of the genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome constituting an organism or part of it like a cell or plant. The knowledge converged in the omics, holds immense potential for understanding the mechanism of diseases, facilitating their early diagnostics, selecting personalized therapeutic strategies, and assessing their effectiveness. Metabolomics is the newest “omics” approach aimed at analyzing large metabolite pools and can detect and evaluate the slightest changes in a complex biological system. It can provide a phenotypic snapshot of a living organism by measuring multiple metabolites directly from complex biological systems including plants [1]. Metabolomics has been found to be suitable for medicinal plants to identify new active compounds, determine the vegetation period, investigate adulteration, evaluate the correlation between activity and chemotaxonomic distribution, and monitor quality control [1-3]. The challenge in plant metabolomics studies is that plant metabolism changes depending on genetic factors as well as various physiological and environmental factors. Therefore, in plant science, the metabolomics approach has become of very important, enabling the detailed analysis of their components, assessment of their quality, nutritional and organoleptic attributes, and studying their functional and toxicological aspects. Some applications of metabolomics in medicinal plant science research are discussed.