REVIEW article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Metabolism and Chemodiversity
This article is part of the Research TopicChemodiversity in Solanaceae Crops: Unveiling New FrontiersView all articles
Unravelling the chemodiversity of eggplants - Insight into their role in the underlying response to biotic and abiotic stresses
Provisionally accepted
Meenakshi Subramanian1Nikhil Kumar Ramesha1KP Abhiram1Manoj Kumar1PT Vismaya1Srinivasamurthy Vanishree1HS Likitha Aishwarya1Srivatsa Udupa1Puthanvila Surendrababu Swathy2
Sachin Thorat1
Arya Kaniyassery1
Laura Toppino3
Yu-Chung Chiang4
Annamalai Muthusamy1*- 1Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India
- 2John Innes Centre, Norwich, United Kingdom
- 3CREA Centro di Ricerca Genomica e Bioinformatica, Fiorenzuola d'Arda, Italy
- 4National Sun Yat-sen University Department of Biological Sciences, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
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Solanum melongena L. is a significant annual vegetable crop belonging to the Solanaceae family. It is cultivated worldwide, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions. It is rich in proteins and dietary fibres and contributes to its broad range of secondary metabolites, thereby increasing its chemodiversity. Secondary metabolites like phenolics, terpenoids, glycoalkaloids, flavonoids, and antioxidants act as stress regulators. While eggplant is known for its phytochemical profile associated with nutraceutical properties, the role of its chemodiversity in conferring tolerance to stresses remains underexplored. Therefore, understanding the chemodiversity of eggplant is crucial for developing stress-resistant cultivars. This approach addresses a critical gap by linking chemodiversity with adaptive responses and offers new perspectives for crop improvement. Currently, researchers are widely using metabolomics, high-throughput analytical tools and bioinformatic tools to evaluate chemodiversity in different parts of plants. Large-scale characterization of the phytochemical diversity of eggplant genotypes under various stress conditions has been performed via high-throughput screening techniques. Understanding the regulatory network and biochemical pathways involved in stress adaptation in eggplant can be accomplished by integrating metabolomics, genomics, and transcriptomics. Overall, this review discusses the importance of chemodiversity in eggplant during stress conditions by highlighting the chemical and metabolic diversity of different eggplant cultivars and their wild relatives, emphasizing their functional roles in plant defense and stress adaptation.
Keywords: Solanum melongena, chemodiversity, abiotic stress, biotic stress, secondary metabolites
Received: 01 Sep 2025; Accepted: 19 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Subramanian, Ramesha, Abhiram, Kumar, Vismaya, Vanishree, Likitha Aishwarya, Udupa, Swathy, Thorat, Kaniyassery, Toppino, Chiang and Muthusamy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Annamalai Muthusamy, a.msamy@manipal.edu
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