4.2. Metabolic Profiling

The targeted metabolite landscape for flavonoids/anthocyanins and carotenoids was explored and analyzed according to the standard procedure detailed by Yuan et al. [90]. The flower samples collected from Iris bulleyana Dykes and I. bulleyana Dykes f. alba YT Zhao were grounded to powder and subjected to LC-MS analysis. UPLC-MS/MS analysis was performed by Metware (http://www.metware.cn). Prior to further data analysis, quality control (QC) analysis was performed. VIP (variable importance in projection) values were identified utilizing PLS-DA. The metabolites were considered differentially expressed when the VIP ≥ 1, and fold change ≥ 2 or fold change ≤ 0.5. To validate the anthocyanin metabolome, three selected anthocyanins were further tested using HPLC-MS/MS performed by Metware (http://www.metware.cn), and their corresponding concentrations were identified in both variants of Southwest iris.