Seagrass Metabolomics: A New Insight towards Marine Based Drug Discovery

Metabolomics is one of the new field of “Omics” approach and the youngest triad of system biology, which provides a broad prospective of how metabolic networks are controlled and indeed emerged as a complementary tool to functional genomics with well-established technologies for genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics. Though, metabolite profiling has been carried out for decades, owing to decisive mechanism of a molecule regulation, the importance of some metabolites in human regimen and their use as diagnostic markers is now being recognized. Plant metabolomics therefore aims to highlight the characterization of metabolite pool of a plant tissue in response to its environment. Seagrassses, a paraphyletic group of marine hydrophilous angiosperms which evolved three to four times from land plants back to the sea. Seagrasses share a number of analogous acquired metabolic adaptations owing to their convergent evolution, but their secondary metabolism varied among the four families that can be considered as true seagrasses. From a chemotaxonomic point of view, numerous specialized metabolites have often been studied in seagrasses. Hence, this chapter focus the metabolome of seagrasses in order to explore their bioactive properties and the recent advancements adopted in analytical technology platforms to study the non-targeted metabolomics of seagrasses using OMICS approach.