Impulse Lecture: Metabolic characterization of plants using NMR-based metabolomics

Pharmacognosy, particularly using plant-originated natural product has played a central role in natural science. Even in these days, the importance of pharmacognosy is not reduced at all. However, due to innate diversity and dynamic changes of metabolites levels, natural product research had a problem with profiling all metabolites, analysis usually limited to a certain group of metabolites. One of the approaches to solve the problem might be metabolomics, a comprehensive profiling all the metabolites in organisms. It takes a part to provide holistic information of whole metabolome network [1–3]. As a part of systems biology, capturing holistic information of the complex metabolic system in unbiased manner has been a dream of natural products researchers for a long time.

Recent advances in analytical chemistry, combined with multivariate data analysis, brought us closer to the final goal of metabolomics, comprehensive evaluation of all metabolites in living organisms including plants.

Of many analytical platforms NMR has been thought as one of the most promising techniques to cover all the metabolites in short time despite its' inherent low sensitivity compared with MS-based technology. In addition to the unambiguous advantages of NMR such as broad coverage of metabolite detection, the easiness of data handling for further statistic treatment and signal robustness have been attracting many metabolomists.

In this presentation, diverse applications of NMR-based metabolomics for chemical characterization of plants, plant physiology, and screening method of bioactive metabolites will be shown as well as a possible protocol developed by our groups [4].

Keywords: Metabolomics, NMR, Chemicals, Characterisation

References: 1. Kim H K et al. (2011) Trend Biotechnol In press.

2. Verpoorte R et al. (2008) Phytochem Rev 7: 525.

3. Verpoorte R et al. (2007) Phytochem Rev 6: 3.

4. Kim HK et al. (2010) Nat Protoc 3: 536.