Avanços na ciência e tecnologia agrícola

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Metabolomics: A Potential Tool for Breeding Nutraceutical Vegetables

Ashish Saxena and Christopher S Cramer

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.