50 Years of Phytochemistry Research

This 43rd volume of RAP includes a total of seven articles based on talks presented at the 50th Anniversary meeting of the PSNA, which was held at the Fairmont Orchid, in Waikoloa, Hawai’i, USA. These seven Perspectives give a very good picture of the breadth of plant (bio)chemistry research in North America, which is also indicative of the state of the field worldwide. Each of these articles describes the integration of several different approaches to ask and then answer interesting questions regarding the function of interesting plant metabolites, either in the plant itself or in interactions with the environment (natural setting or human health application).   Two Perspectives outline very clearly the power of approaching biological questions from a modern, “omics” or systems biology approach. Beale and Ward outline how metabolomics approaches can be brought to bear on plant biosynthetic questions and quickly lead to important advances in our understanding or how plants produce important metabolites. Zandkarimi et al. outline the integration of ion mobility spectrometry into mass spectrometry-based metabolomics investigations and show clearly how powerful those two spectrometric technologies can be when used together.