Exploring metabolome with GC/MS
Résumé
The rapidly expanding field of metabolomics has been driven by major advances in analytical tools such as mass spectrometry and the corresponding hyphenated methods such as gas chromatography (GC-MS) but also in chemometrics and bioinformatics. The metabolomic field has been mainly developed in plant sciences and GC/MS was applied very early as it allowed determining a large number of metabolites in a wide range of samples. A typical metabolomic experiment includes (i) sample preparation, (ii) derivatization, (iii) metabolic profiling by GC/MS, (iv) treatment of data set, (v) identification of key or discriminatory metabolites and eventually (vi) their quantification. Each of these steps needs to be optimized and technical choices are determined depending on the scientific objective. This chapter gives a review of technologies and methods dedicated to GC/MS-based metabolomics, as well as the description of major advances in this area in recent years and perspectives for the future. Finally, the main application area of plant metabolomics, linked to phytochemistry, gene modifications and environmental disorders, are briefly presented.