Identification of Stress-Responsive Metabolites in Plants Using an Untargeted Metabolomics Approach

Stress can affect different groups of plant metabolites and multiple signaling pathways. Untargeted metabolomics enables the collection of whole-spectrum data for the entire metabolite content present in plant tissues at that point in time. We present a thorough approach for large-scale, untargeted metabolomics of plant tissues using reverse-phase liquid chromatography connected to high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-MS) of dilute methanolic extract. MZmine is a specialized computer software that automates the alignment and baseline modification of all derived mass peaks across all samples, resulting in precise information on the relative abundance of hundreds of metabolites reflected by thousands of mass signals. Further processing with statistic and bioinformatic techniques will provide a comprehensive perspective of the variations and connections among groups of samples.