Metabolomics as a Tool to Investigate Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants

Metabolites reflect the integration of gene expression, protein interaction and other different regulatory processes and are therefore closer to the phenotype than mRNA transcripts or proteins alone. Amongst all -omics technologies, metabolomics is the most transversal and can be applied to different organisms with little or no modifications. It has been successfully applied to the study of molecular phenotypes of plants in response to abiotic stress in order to find particular patterns associated to stress tolerance. These studies have highlighted the essential involvement of primary metabolites: sugars, amino acids and Krebs cycle intermediates as direct markers of photosynthetic dysfunction as well as…