Metabolomics is an emerging omics technology after genomics and proteomics and it tends to qualify and quantify all metabolites of small molecular weight in an organism of cells. Plant metabolites are extremely diverse in terms of their classes, content, and functions, and plant metabolomics therefore is an important part of metabolomics. Plant metabolites are the readouts of physiological status of a plant, and the investigation of the change and regulation of plant metabolites as a whole will lay a foundation for the dissection of plants' growth, development and their interactions with the environments. Plant metabolomics has been widely applied in investigating the accumulation pattern of metabolites and the underlying genetic basis, the identification of genes involved in metabolism, and is one of the hotspots in modern plant biology. In this review, we summarize current development of the technical platforms in plant metabolomics, as well as its applications in plant biology.

metabolomics  /  widely-targeted metabolomics  /  quantitative trait loci  /  genome-wide association study  /  gene function