Abstract
Metabolomics (analysis of "all" small molecules present in a sample) is a rapidly emerging and powerful tool to understand biological systems. Despite the incredible number and complexity of plant metabolic components, PLANT metabolomics is leading the way! (one renowned yeast-centric speaker, Steve Oliver, U Manchester, Editor of"Comparitive and Functional Genomics", referred to people doing metabolomics on plants as people who like having sex standing up in a hammock)

The high-throughput nature of the data (one US company, Paradigm, is generating 9 Gigabytes/day) plus multiple technical issues related to compound identification and quantification (integration of the area under peaks, comparison of peaks across samples, etc) means that computer scientists with biological inclinations will not soon be out of a job.

Although metabolomics is an emerging technology, the metabolite information now being generated is leading to novel biological insights.