Consider this compelling fact: herbaria contain vast collections of unique chemical factories, possibly containing uncharacterized molecules, even unanalyzed ethnobotanical medicines, each having produced a specific panoply of specialized metabolites-- yet that information is almost always completely missing from the scientific record. As of today, there has been no further work to elucidate the specific chemistry of the vast majority of these unique collections of plants. There simply have been no minimally-invasive pipelines developed to assess, organize, and utilize metabolomics data within the existing digitization platform. In a plant biology landscape that is interested in probing the molecular scale, the addition of detailed chemical information obtained from the equivalent of as little as 0.001% of the mass of a typical dried leaf brings an additional prospect of renewed interest in and funding possibilities for herbaria. With advances in analysis, this work shows the possibilites for breaking ground on a new field of <i>herbariomics</i>: the complete cataloging of the chemical entities contained in a herbarium specimen or in a collection of preserved specimens.

Herbariomics: Expanding possibilities for herbaria-based research pipelines by defining the herbariome

255th National Meeting (2018)

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