Metabolomics for salinity research

Soil salinity devastates agriculture. It reduces crop yields and makes arable land unsuitable for later use. Many species have evolved highly efficient strategies to sense, transduce, and build up tolerance to high salinity and even sensitive species have endogenous mechanism for coping with this stress. These underlying physiological and metabolic mechanisms can be unraveled using metabolomics. Here we describe detailed protocols of how to extract polar metabolites for analysis using GC-MS and LC-MS. We also touch briefly on considerations that should be taken into account when designing the experiment and how the resulting data may be analyzed and visualized in a biological context.