Advances of high-resolution NMR techniques in the structural and metabolic analysis of plant biochemistry

Rapid progress in instrumentation and software made nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) one of the most powerful analytical methods in biological sciences. Whereas the development of multidimensional NMR pulse sequences is an ongoing process, a small subset of two-dimensional NMR experiments is typically sufficient for the rapid structure determination of small metabolites. The use of sophisticated three- and four-dimensional NMR experiments enables the determination of the three-dimensional structures of proteins with a molecular weight up to 100 kDa, and solution structures of more than 100 plant proteins have been established by NMR spectroscopy. NMR has also been introduced to the emerging field of metabolomics where it can provide unbiased information about metabolite profiles of plant extracts. In recent times, high-resolution NMR has become a key technology for the elucidation of biosynthetic pathways and metabolite flux via quantitative assessment of multiple isotopologues. This review summarizes some of the recent advances of high-resolution NMR spectroscopy in the field of plant sciences.