The perspectives of metabolomic studies of potato plants

According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, potato is ranked the fourth crop in terms of food production after rice, wheat and maize, and the first among tuber and root crops. The importance of potato is difficult to overestimate; it is a valuable source of carbohydrates, antioxidants and vitamins. A large number of investigations are focused on the study of metabolic processes occurring in the potato plant in order to elucidate the mechanisms responsible for productivity, accumulation of the compounds that determine taste and nutritional quality, maintaining the quality of tubers in storage, plant resistance to pathogens, etc. The sum of the metabolites, which are produced as a result of the metabolic network activity, is defined as the metabolome. Complex studies of metabolic diversity with the use of modern state-of-the-art chromatography approaches and the highly precise detection of individual compounds revealed the specificity of metabolic spectra from the subcellular to the organismal levels and its amazing plasticity under the influence of a variety of internal and external stimuli. Metabolomic approaches are already in use for phenotyping the available species, lines, and varieties, as well as for evaluating the potato plants’ resistance to environmental challenges and for detecting changes in tubers during storage. Metabolome profiling is widely employed to study differences between genetically modified forms of potatoes from their untransformed relatives. A limited number of systemic studies on potatoes combine metabolome investigations with genome, transcriptome, and proteome analysis. These studies point to the important role of the genome in determining metabolic rates. It is also obvious that the search for biochemical markers depends on standartization of the cultivation techniques, sample preparation and subsequent analysis, similar to the practice developed for the progress in genomic and transcriptomic studies. In the future, metabolome studies could complement the classical and molecular approaches to develop new potato strains and varieties.