Role of Metabolomics in Crop Improvement

Metabolomics plays a major role in the field of plant biology and its application is likely to expand in crop biotechnology. In Arabidopsis, the prediction of new gene functions and gene-to-metabolite has been established by an integrated analysis of transcriptome and metabolome. The approach developed in Arabidopsis can be effectively applied to other crop plants in order to understand and improve their traits. Our research group has developed an extensive analytical platform for determining biochemical diversity, which was applied to decipher the function of rice genes in rice knockout mutants and Arabidopsis lines overexpressing rice cDNAs (rice FOX Arabidopsis). This strategy allowed us to evaluate and estimate agronomical and nutritional traits in rice by regression analysis of the rice metabolome for the World Rice Core Collection. Metabolite quantitative loci (mQTL) analysis was used in rice to examine the application of biotechnology in rice grains. This technology was further applied to objectively evaluate the nutritive equivalence of genetically modified tomatoes. This review presents and discusses the crucial role of metabolomics in crop biotechnology.