Functional Metabolomics—A Useful Tool to Characterize Stress-Induced Metabolome Alterations Opening New Avenues towards Tailoring Food Crop Quality

The breeding of stress-tolerant cultivated plants that would allow for a reduction in harvest losses and undesirable decrease in quality attributes requires a new quality of knowledge on molecular markers associated with relevant agronomic traits, on quantitative metabolic responses of plants to stress challenges, and on the mechanisms controlling the biosynthesis of these molecules. By combining metabolomics with genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics datasets a more comprehensive knowledge of the composition of crop plants used for food or animal feed is possible. In order to optimize crop trait developments, to enhance crop yields and quality, as well as to guarantee nutritional and health factors that provide the possibility to create functional food or feedstuffs, knowledge about the plants’ metabolome is crucial. Next to classical metabolomics studies, this review focuses on several metabolomics-based working techniques, such as sensomics, lipidomics, hormonomics and phytometabolomics, which were used to characterize metabolome alterations during abiotic and biotic stress in order to find resistant food crops with a preferred quality or at least to produce functional food crops