Expanding our coverage: Strategies to detect a greater range of metabolites

Abstract

Whilst the study of metabolites can arguably be traced back several hundred years it began in earnest in the 20^th century with studies based on single metabolites or simple metabolic pathways. The advent of metabolomics and in particular the adoption of high-resolution mass spectrometry now means we can faithfully annotate and quantify in excess of 1000 plant metabolites. Whilst this is an impressive leap it falls well short of the estimated number of metabolites in the plant kingdom. This, whilst considerable and important insights have been achieved using commonly utilized approaches, there is a need to improve the coverage of the metabolome. Here, we review three largely complementary strategies (i) methods based on using chemical libraries (ii) methods based on molecular networking and (iii) approaches that link metabolomics and genetic variance. It is our contention that using all three approaches in tandem represents the best approach to tackle this challenge.

Keywords: Mass spectrometry; Metabolite identification; Metabolome.