Metabolomics: an unexplored tool for allelopathy studies

Allelopathy is a very complex phenomenon, influenced by many inherent and environmental factors. Due to this complexity, its elucidation is a challenging task, requiring expertises from several fields. A valuable approach to study these interactions is systems biology, a holistic approach giving a broad view of biological systems and relying on omics technologies. Among omics sciences, metabolomics could be very powerful, but despite its potential it has been seldom applied to allelopathy studies. This review aims to introduce metabolomics approach to researchers involved in the study of allelopathy: to this end, an overview of this approach is given along with examples of application of metabolomics to other ecological issues (effects of abiotic and biotic stresses). Furthermore, the scarce examples of application of metabolomics or metabolomics-related approaches to allelopathy studies are reported.