classified as either an endogenous or exogenous factor. the main exogenous factors are diet and drugs. diet can then be broken down to nutrients and non-nutrients. metabolomics is one means to determine a biological endpoint, or metabolic fingerprint, which reflects the balance of all these forces on an individual's metabolism. plant metabolomics is designed to study the overall changes in metabolites of plant samples and then conduct deep data mining and chemometric analysis. specialized metabolites are considered components of plant defense systems biosynthesized in response to biotic and abiotic stresses.metabolomics approaches have recently been used to assess the natural variance in metabolite content between individual plants, an approach with great potential for the improvement of the compositional quality of crops.