Breeding

Produce Quality is inheritantly determined by metabolites, whether it is the nutritional value, colour, shelf-life, fresh produce or flavour (taste and aroma) of plant products. Furthermore many input traits, like yield, fruit set, stress tolerance or disease resistance are influenced or regulated by metabolites. Thus to answer problems in trait breeding it is crucial to understand the biochemical mechanisms underlying traits of interest. 

Metabolite profiling or fingerprinting can be used in exploiting metabolite QTL in populations or in mapping traits. 

Crop Protection 

In crop protection it is important to monitor and determine the mode-of-action of pesticides, whether these are herbicides, funghicides or insecticides. The biochemical mechanism of novel compounds with unknown actions can be elucidated using meteabolite profiling. Most crucial is the toxicity of those bioactive compounds. Metabolomic technologies allows to comprehensively monitor all effects and by-products of the compound.