Untargeted metabolomics enables the identification of key changes to standard pathways, but also aids in revealing other important and possibly novel metabolites or pathways for further analysis. Much progress has been made in this field over the past decade and yet plant metabolomics seems to still be an emerging approach because of the high complexity of plant metabolites and the number one challenge of untargeted metabolomics, metabolite identification. This final and critical stage remains the focus of current research. The intention of this review is to give a brief current state of LC-MS based untargeted metabolomics approaches for plant specific samples and to review the emerging solutions in mass spectrometer hardware and computational tools that can help predict a compound's molecular structure to improve the identification rate.
Keywords: computational biology; mass spectrometry; metabolite identification; metabolomics.
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Portland Press Limited on behalf of the Biochemical Society and the Royal Society of Biology.