Metabolomics: a recent advanced omics technology in herbal medicine research

Abstract

Abstract The metabolome of medicinal plants are the precious source for the progress of new phytotherapeutics to treat various diseases. From the last decade, metabolomics is a rapidly growing powerful and emerging technology in the field of herbal medicine for the high throughput comprehensive identification and profiling of both targeted and untargeted metabolites in medicinal plants. Hence, this metabolomics platform is providing an opportunity for the herbal drug discovery and qualitative control of medicinal plants and also in predicting that explaining the dynamic picture of the complex phenotype of biosystems through the study of endogenous metabolites. Nowadays, different new analytical platforms and bioinformatics technologies are developing and they are showing significant improvement in the plant metabolomics studies. Generally, the analytical platforms used in the plant metabolomics are gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC–MS), liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC–MS), and liquid chromatography-solid phase extraction-nuclear magnetic resonance (LC–SPE–NMR). However, GC-MS and LC-MS are the leading platforms in the plant metabolomics studies due to its dynamic range of detection and sensitivity and can analyze hundreds of metabolites in parallel. The combination of comparative metabolomics techniques with plant biotechnology will provide a benefit in medical research. This chapter provides detailed information on the comprehensive analysis of untargeted metabolites in medicinal plants based on both NMR and MS platforms that include the basic principle approaches, sample preparation, workflow, data analysis and metabolite identification. It also provides the information related to the application of metabolomics approach to ensure the quality control of medical plants, the challenges faced during the metabolomics studies along with the remedies to overcome all the challenges and benefits of the metabolomics approach in the herbal medicine research.