Recent advances in stable isotope-enabled mass spectrometry-based plant metabolomics

Methods employing isotope labeled compounds have been an important part of the bioanalytical canon for many decades. The past fifteen years have seen the development of many new approaches using stable (non-radioactive) isotopes as labels for high-throughput bioanalytical, ‘omics-scale’ measurements of metabolites (metabolomics) and proteins (proteomics). This review examines stable isotopic labeling approaches that have been developed for labeling whole intact plants, plant tissues, or crude extracts of plant materials with stable isotopes (mainly using ²H, ¹³C, ¹⁵N, ¹⁸O or ³⁴S). The application of metabolome-scale labeling for improving metabolite annotation, metabolic pathway elucidation, and relative quantification in mass spectrometry-based metabolomics of plants is also reviewed.