Exploring the Diversity of Plant Metabolism

Plants produce a huge array of metabolites in spatiotemporal- and/or environment-dependent manner, which not only make it a challenge to understand plant metabolic diversity but also render plants ideal models for identifying metabolites and dissecting metabolic pathways. In addition to reverse genetic approaches, forward genetic-based approaches combining genome sequences with population genetics provide clues for understanding biological mechanisms. Genomic evolution provides the genetic basis for metabolic diversity, including gene duplication, gene loss, transposon insertion, and the evolution of substrate preference. Selective events during crop domestication and improvement have also played a vital role in the evolution of metabolism. Analysis of the metabolome in genetically diverse populations can also facilitate the dissection of phenotypic traits, and will eventually lead to metabolite-assisted breeding of crops. Plants produce a huge array of metabolites, far more than those produced by most other organisms. Unraveling this diversity and its underlying genetic variation has attracted increasing research attention. Post-genomic profiling platforms have enabled the marriage and mining of the enormous amount of phenotypic and genetic diversity. We review here achievements to date and challenges remaining that are associated with plant metabolic research using multi-omic strategies. We focus mainly on strategies adopted in investigating the diversity of plant metabolism and its underlying features. Recent advances in linking metabotypes with phenotypic and genotypic traits are also discussed. Taken together, we conclude that exploring the diversity of metabolism could provide new insights into plant evolution and domestication