Review Article
Metabolomics: A Potential Tool for Breeding Nutraceutical Vegetables
Ashish Saxena1* and Christopher S Cramer2 | ||
1Corn Breeder, Dow AgroSciences, 1117 Recharge Road, York, NE, 68476, USA | ||
2Department of Plant and Environmental, Sciences, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, 88003, USA | ||
Corresponding Author : | Ashish Saxena Corn Breeder, Dow AgroSciences 1117 Recharge Road, York NE, 68476, USA E-mail: ASaxena@dow.com |
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Received January 18, 2013; Accepted April 30, 2013; Published May 10, 2013 | ||
Citation: Saxena A, Cramer CS (2013) Metabolomics: A Potential Tool for Breeding Nutraceutical Vegetables. Adv Crop Sci Tech 1:106. doi: 10.4172/2329-8863.1000106 | ||
Copyright: © 2013 Saxena A, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. | ||
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Abstract
Plant breeding has been quite successful to keep up with the food requirement of every growing world’s
population. The new challenge for plant breeders is to incorporate human health benefits in plant based foods, also called as nutraceuticals. With the recent technological advancements in biological sciences and instrumentation, nutraceutical breeding is becoming easier. Metabolomics is a key technology available to plant breeders that can combine with existing technologies to breed healthier plant food. Onions is a widely-grown crop that has tremendous health benefits. The health benefits of onions are due to secondary metabolites. In nature, plants produce secondary metabolites in low quantities. The use of metabolomics to determine production mechanisms of secondary metabolites would help develop onion cultivars that contain high levels of secondary metabolites.