Investigation of Brassica biochemical status by NMR-based metabolomics

Over the past decades Brassica has become an important source of oil and proteins for animal and human nutrition. In addition to the nutritional benefits, they constitute a very rich source of health-promoting phytochemicals such as phenols, flavonoids, hydroxycinnamic acids, vitamins, glucosinolates, fats and carotenoids. Moreover, due to the high resemblance to Arabidopsis, Brassica is gaining its interest as a suitable model system for plant science. Understanding biochemical response of plant upon environmental stress is important as resulting metabolome changes will ultimately effecting quality attributes of crop. Recently metabolomics as a part of systems biology approach has been applied in many fields. Among different analytical methods, mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy are considered as the most suitable analytical platform for plant metabolomics. Particularly, NMR-based metabolomic approach has been successfully applied in many filed in plant science, with the merit of high reproducibility, quantitation, ease of sample preparation and handling, analysis of wide range of metabolites in a single run. In this review, NMR-based metabolomics approach to study the biochemical responses of plant under various stress conditions has been described using Brassica as a model plant.