Furthermore, FT-IR spectroscopy techniques could be applied for high-throughput screening and metabolic evaluation of new cultivars or elite lines in conventional breeding programs. All contributing authors declare no conflicts of interest. This work was supported Z-VAD-FMK solubility dmso by a grant (NRF-2011-0030880 to S.W.K) from the National Research Foundation of Korea and a grant (PJ008329

to S.W.K.) from the Next-Generation BioGreen 21 Program of the Rural Development Administration of Korea. “
“Ginseng has been considered one of the most valuable medicinal herbs in oriental countries for the past 2,000 yr, and now it is widely used as an alternative medicine and health food [1]. At present, ginseng production is pegged at approximately 8,000 tons/yr; traditional

therapeutic herbs are consumed in 35 countries around the world, and its global market was estimated to be about $2,000 million (US dollars) [2]. Most of this production is limited to two genera of ginseng (Panax ginseng and Panax quinquefolius), and four countries—South Korea, China, Canada, and the United States—are the world’s biggest ginseng producers. The roots of P. ginseng (Korean ginseng) and P. quinquefolius (American ginseng), two closely related herbal species belonging to the Panax genus, are two of the most commonly used medicinal herbs. However, aside from its wide use as traditional medicine, ginseng is also used for other purposes. Therefore, discrimination

this website and differentiation between these two herbal genera are of importance in terms of food safety and pharmaceutical value. As the characteristics, morphology, and chemical compositions of P. ginseng and P. quinquefolius are very similar, use of traditional methods based on morphological and physicochemical characteristics enough for identification of these two genera is rather problematic. The study of the currently known most reliable method is based on chromatographic separation of isomeric compounds of ginsenoside Rf and 24(R)-pseudoginsenoside F11, two potential markers present in P. ginseng and P. quinquefolius [3], [4] and [5]. In recent years, attempts have been made to solve this problem using metabolomics [6]. Metabolomics is a relatively new field of “omics” research concerned with the high-throughput identification and quantification of small-molecule metabolites in the metabolome. It has emerged as an important tool in many disciplines such as human diseases and nutrition, drug discovery, and plant physiology [7], [8], [9], [10], [11] and [12]. The metabolome of an organism is a compilation of all of its metabolites. Metabolites are small molecules; polymeric biomolecules, such as polysaccharides, lignin, peptides, proteins, DNA, and RNA, are excluded from this category. For this reason, metabolomics is called “a snapshot of an organism,” showing which compounds are present and in what quantities at a given time point.