Plant Single-Cell Metabolomics and Metabolite Imaging: Current Advances and Future Directions.

Mass spectrometry-based single-cell metabolomics and mass spectrometry imaging are enabling direct measurement and spatial mapping of plant metabolites at single-cell and subcellular scales.

• Why it matters: Metabolites reflect cellular biochemical activity and physiological state in ways gene expression alone cannot, addressing a gap in linking chemical diversity to cell identity and function.
• What they did: The review covers plant single-cell sampling, scMet, and MSI workflows, and discusses emerging strategies such as spectral libraries, computational metabolomics, and AI-assisted metabolite annotation.
• The result: These advances support efforts to reveal the plant “dark metabolome” and enable long-term construction of quantitative, spatially resolved signaling and metabolic networks at single-cell resolution.

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