Exploring the metabolic space of plant defense

Plants are master synthetic organic chemists, capable of synthesizing a plethora of structurally diverse specialized metabolites in order to adapt to the hostile environment. However, to date, the majority of those small molecules remains unknown. Next-generation of mass spectrometry (MS) metabolomics propelled by new bioinformatics developments provides a long-awaited framework to unravel the structure and function of plant defensive metabolites, much like the advances in next-generation sequencing of the last two decades impacted all research horizons in genomics. This talk will present our recent developments in structural metabolomics and provide examples of how such analytical innovations when integrated within other frameworks could help unravel plant chemistry at the interface of species interactions.