Environmental and Biological Factors Shaping Metabolic Variation in Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.): A Metabolomics-Based Review

Potatoes (Solanum tuberosum L.) contain a diverse range of primary and secondary metabolites that determine their nutritional, storage, and defense characteristics. There has been an increasing number of metabolomics-based studies in potato breeding and stress assessments recently; however, there remains a lack of comprehensive studies addressing metabolite variation using multiple analytical techniques. Metabolomics offers valuable insights into these variations by enabling the identification of key metabolic markers, and the combined use of multiple analytical techniques on the same sample allows for broader metabolite coverage. This review provides an integrated understanding of how primary and secondary metabolism is influenced by environmental and developmental conditions across potato organs as characterized by various analytical techniques. Unlike existing reviews, this manuscript provides a critical evaluation of studies examining the effects of cultivation systems and potato plant developmental stages on primary metabolites across different organs while also emphasizing the role of newly characterized secondary metabolites in stress responses and offering a comparative assessment of extraction techniques. Metabolomic approaches assess the combined effects of multiple intrinsic and extrinsic factors, and through the integration of multi-omics datasets, enabled by the rapid advancement of bioinformatics tools, they enhance our understanding of potato physiology and support improved crop management and breeding strategies.