A Widely Metabolomic Analysis Revealed Metabolic Alterations of Leaves at Different Growth Stages.

folium is the major medicinally-used organ of species and its metabolic changes during the leaf growth have not been studied at the metabolomic level. is one of five recorded species in the Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China and widely grows in China. A UPLC-ESI-MS/MS-based targeted metabolomic analysis was implemented to explore the metabolite composition in leaves under the cultivation condition and further to investigate their temporal variations among four representative growth stages. A total of 403 metabolites, including 32 hitherto known in species, were identified in leaf, of which 302 metabolites showed the growth/development-dependent alterations. Flavonoid-type compounds were the major composition of the metabolites identified in this study. Most flavonoids, together with tannin-type and lignans and coumarin-type compounds, were up-regulated with leaf growth and maturation after the full flowering stage. Our results not only greatly enriched the existing phytochemical composition database and also, for the first time, provided the metabolomics-wide information on metabolic changes during leaf growth and development, which would facilitate in the choice of an optimum harvest time to balance a higher biomass yield of folium with its better medicinal quality.