High Impact MoTo DB: A Metabolic Database for Tomato

An organism’s metabolome is the cataloguing of the entire set of metabolites found in the organism. It is dynamic and thus just a snapshot of the processes going on in the organism at one specific time point. When combined with other ‘‘omics’’ data, a more complete understanding of the organism emerges (Fiehn et al., 2000). However, several technical challenges to obtaining a metabolomic profile of an organism exist, as no single technique is capable of detecting all of the metabolites. Thus, a variety of analytical techniques must be used due to the large variety of compounds that make up a metabolome. Common metabolite databases need to be established to facilitate the identification of the compounds. In 2006, Moco et al. published an article in Plant Physiology titled ‘‘A Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry-Based Metabolome Database for Tomato’’ describing a new database. The authors validated the database by comparing tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) fruit peel and flesh tissues.