Tensor methods in data analysis of chromatography/mass spectroscopy-based plant metabolomics

Plant metabolomics is an important research area in plant science. Chemometrics is a useful tool for plant metabolomic data analysis and processing. Among them, high-order chemometrics represented by tensor modeling provides a new and promising technical method for the analysis of complex multi-way plant metabolomics data. This paper systematically reviews different tensor methods widely applied to the analysis of complex plant metabolomic data. The advantages and disadvantages as well as the latest methodological advances of tensor models are reviewed and summarized. At the same time, application of different tensor methods in solving plant science problems are also reviewed and discussed. The reviewed applications of tensor methods in plant metabolomics cover a wide range of important plant science topics including plant gene mutation and phenotype, plant disease and resistance, plant pharmacology and nutrition analysis, and plant products ingredient characterization and quality evaluation. It is evident from the review that tensor methods significantly promote the automated and intelligent process of plant metabolomics analysis and profoundly affect the paradigm of plant science research. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review to systematically summarize the tensor analysis methods in plant metabolomic data analysis.