Metabolomics and its use in ecology

Metabolomics may be defined as the analysis of thousands of naturally occurring small molecules (metabolites) such as sugars, organic acids, amino acids and nucleotides that are the products of cellular metabolism. As such, it is essentially the study of the complete biochemical phenotype (or metabotype) of any biofluid, cell, tissue or indeed organism, at both the qualitative and quantitative level. Metabolic profiles are context dependent, and will change in response to environmental circumstances. Therefore, while the technique has primarily been used in biomedical research to date, it is also applicable to ecological investigations and shows great promise in measuring the impact of factors such as climate change, disease, food restriction, infection and parasite load. In this review we detail the history and background of metabolomics and discuss examples of previous and potential future metabolic studies and applications in ecological science.     

Identification of root exudates from the Pb-accumulator Sedum alfredii under Pb stresses and assessment of their roles

The Pb-accumulator Sedum alfredii is a good phytoremediation material, and widely used in the phytoremediation research of soils contaminated with Pb. The root exudates from it may be playing a significant role in the process of phytoremediation. In this study, the metabonomics method which based on gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) and pattern recognition analysis was used to identify the remarkable root exudates from S. alfredii under different Pb stresses, including exposure concentrations (0, 10, 50, 200 and 1000?µmol/L) and times (4 and 8 days). And batch extraction experiments were used to verify the roles of these remarkable root exudates. According to the results, 11 metabolites were considered as the remarkable metabolites. Oxalic acid, galactonic acid and glyceric acid can remove Pb in soil, and the removal effect was: oxalic acid?>?galactonic acid?>?glyceric acid. Xylose, glucose and maltose have no removal effect for Pb in soil.