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Concepts in Plant Metabolomics

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CONCEPTS IN PLANT METABOLOMICS

Concepts in Plant Metabolomics

Edited by

BASIL J. NIKOLAU Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, U.S.A. and

EVE SYRKIN WURTELE Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, U.S.A.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4020-5607-9 (HB) ISBN 978-1-4020-5608-6 (e-book) Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2007 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

PREFACE Metabolomics is a word that progress in science forces linguists to invent in order to keep up with emerging technologies. The word is a hybridization of two words, metabolites and genomics, and it reflects a shift in biological research that is now possible in an era in which the entire genetic blueprint of an organism is available for scientific research. Although the concepts of metabolomics are in the scientific literature since the 1970s, the word “metabolomics” was first used in the title of a scientific publication in 2001. Since then, the field of metabolomics has expanded and is becoming an integral sector of post-genomic research in biology. Analogous to genomics, which defines all genes in a genome irrespective of their functionality, metabolomics seeks to profile “all” metabolites in a biological sample irrespective of the chemical and physical properties of these molecules. Despite the fact that this is probably an unachievable goal, the ability to profile an everincreasing proportion of the metabolome (the set of all metabolites of a sample) has many applications is solving biological problems. These range from the expansion of the tradition of natural products chemistry, to the finding of metabolic markers of disease states in humans and animals. In the field of plant biology, metabolomics has a key role as a fundamental tool in basic research for elucidating gene functions that are currently undefined. Thus, metabolomics has the potential of defining cellular processes as it provides a measure of the ultimate phenotype of an organism, as defined by the collage of small molecules, whose levels of accumulation is altered in response to genetic and environmentally induced changes in gene expression. As an emerging field of science, new developments will greatly change the practice of metabolomics; these will likely occur in the area of improvement in analytical technologies and computational integration and interpretation of data. We hope that this book will present a guide for new practitioners of metabolomics, providing insights as to its current use and applica