Solving the Jigsaw Puzzle of Wound-Healing Potato Cultivars: Metabolite Profiling and Antioxidant Activity of Polar Extracts

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is a worldwide food staple, but substantial waste accompanies the cultivation of this crop due to wounding of the outer skin and subsequent unfavorable healing conditions. Motivated by both economic and nutritional considerations, this metabolite profiling study aims to improve understanding of closing layer and wound periderm formation and guide the development of new methods to ensure faster and more complete healing after skin breakage. The polar metabolites of wound-healing tissues from four potato cultivars with differing patterns of tuber skin russeting (Norkotah Russet, Atlantic, Chipeta, and Yukon Gold) were analyzed at three and seven days after wounding, during suberized closing layer formation and nascent wound periderm development, respectively. The polar extracts were assessed using LC-MS and NMR spectroscopic methods, including multivariate analysis and tentative identification of 22 of the 24 biomarkers that discriminate among the cultivars at a given wound-healing time point or between developmental stages. Differences among the metabolites that could be identified from NMR- and MS-derived biomarkers highlight the strengths and limitations of each method, also demonstrating the complementarity of these approaches in terms of assembling a complete molecular picture of the tissue extracts. Both methods revealed that differences among the cultivar metabolite profiles diminish as healing proceeds during the period following wounding. The biomarkers included polyphenolic amines, flavonoid glycosides, phenolic acids and glycoalkaloids. Because wound healing is associated with oxidative stress, the free radical scavenging activities of the extracts from different cultivars were measured at each wounding time point, revealing significantly higher scavenging activity of the Yukon Gold periderm especially after 7 days of wounding.