Figure 1.

An illustration of the applications of metabolomics for crop improvement. Metabolomics can be integrated with other omics tools to elucidate the molecular phenotype corresponding to the desired trait of interest and to assist in the mapping of unique genes regulating different metabolic pathways under different conditions (we use climate stress as an example). Molecular information collected from genomics and phenomics can be used to correlate traits or genes through quantitative trait loci (QTL) and genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Metabolomics-based QTL (mQTL) and metabolomics-based GWAS (mGWAS) measure variations in molecular phenotype without requiring any genetic information, and thereby remove the genotype–phenotype gap efficiently.