Application of Metabolomics in Fungal Research

Author: mycolabadmin
2022-10-29
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Summary

This research examines how scientists use metabolomics – the study of small molecules produced by organisms – to better understand fungi. This advanced analytical approach helps researchers identify different fungi species, discover new compounds they produce, and understand how fungi interact with plants and respond to environmental stress. Here’s how this impacts everyday life: • Helps develop better antifungal medications and treatments for fungal infections • Improves our ability to use beneficial fungi in food production and fermentation • Enables better crop protection by understanding how harmful fungi attack plants • Leads to discovery of new natural compounds from fungi that could be used in medicines • Advances our understanding of how fungi contribute to environmental processes and ecosystem health

Background

Metabolomics is an essential method to study dynamic changes in metabolic networks and products using modern analytical techniques to reveal life phenomena and their inherent laws. It emerged following genomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics, with the concept first originating from metabolomic profiling in 1971. Traditional metabolomics is divided into targeted and untargeted approaches, with recent developments including widely targeted, pseudotargeted, quasi-targeted, and LM precision targeted metabolomics.

Objective

This review aims to examine and summarize the applications of metabolomics in fungal research across five key areas: identification, response to stress, metabolite discovery, metabolism engineering, and fungal interactions with plants. The goal is to promote further research and understanding of fungal metabolomics.

Results

The review found significant applications of metabolomics across multiple areas of fungal research. In taxonomic identification, metabolomics provided more accurate classification than traditional morphological methods. For stress response studies, metabolomics revealed various pathway changes in fungi under different environmental conditions. In metabolite discovery, new compounds and bioactive substances were identified. For metabolic engineering, metabolomics helped analyze changes after DNA recombination. In plant-fungal interactions, metabolomics provided insights into symbiotic relationships and pathogenic mechanisms.

Conclusion

Metabolomics has proven to be a powerful and effective tool for fungal research, providing comprehensive and systematic analytical approaches. While significant progress has been made, challenges remain including the lack of standardized methods for quenching and extracting fungal metabolites, complex data processing, imperfect automated platforms, and incomplete fungal metabolomics databases. Despite these challenges, metabolomics continues to provide new insights into fungal research and contributes to a deeper understanding of fungi’s complex interactions and responses to environmental and genetic changes.

Published in:Molecules,
Study Type:Review,
Source: 10.3390/molecules27217365