New Trends in Phytohormone Analysis

Phytohormones are key regulators in various physiological processes of plant growth and development. Their chemical analyses, together with their genomics and proteomics, are an integral part of plant development studies. The information on hormone levels is often valuable for biologists dealing with any hormone-regulated processes. Plant tissue is a complex multicomponent mixture containing phytohormones in minute quantities (pg or ng/g fresh weight) along with many other related compounds with similar structures and/or physicochemical properties. Therefore, their analysis requires rapid, sensitive and sufficiently selective analytical methods. The significance of solid-phase extraction for purification and hyphenated techniques such as GC-MS, LC-MS and CE-MS for routine analyses of phytohormones is discussed.