Interaction between plant secondary metabolites and the human metabolome

Abstract

Metabolomics is the large-scale identification and quantification of metabolites present in cells of different tissues and in extracellular fluids of different organisms, from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. Metabolomics also provides unique fingerprints for each metabolitepresent in a particular cellular physiological state or pathological condition.Metabolites are the end products of cellular metabolites are the end products of cellular metabolic pathways, and their levels represent the last stage of response of a biological system. Changes in the expression of genes and proteins that are highly regulatedlead to increase or decrease certain metabolites which leads to a modification of metabolic flows and this will have a relevant impact on the regulation of metabolic pathways. Thus, metabolomics represents the logical progression from large-scale analysis of RNA and proteins at the systems level. However, unlike the RNAs and proteins, which have a repetitive structure, the metabolites present in the cells differ in chemical structure and concentration, so a variety of methodologies and tools should be used for their study, such as gas or liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (GC-MS or HPLC-MS, respectively), nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), and many techniquesderived from these methodologies.