Advances in understanding CO2 responsive plant metabolomes in the era of climate change

Anthropogenic climate change due to increased CO2 emission poses a major threat to global crop productivity, food quality, and security. Numerous studies, mostly classical, have predicted the effects of increased CO2 levels on environmental temperature and water balance, and on the life cycle, biomass, photosynthesis, leaf carbon/nitrogen ratio, and stomatal distribution in various plant species. With the advent of high-throughput tools for studying plant-CO2 responsiveness, it is now possible to obtain a metabolome-level view of the effect of climate change on plants. In this review, we examine the plant CO2-responsive primary and secondary metabolism, isoprene emission, in the presence of other stressors, and the advancement in state-of the art research methods that will facilitate future metabolomic studies.