Statistics in mass spectrometry

Hi everyone,

I have a question for those of you who has some experience with statistical analysis in mass spectrometry.

I'm kinda new to that, and i don't really know how data are interpreted. I have this huge file with thousands of compounds annotated (both sure and not very sure ones) and i have to compare the content of these compounds in 4 different groups of plants. I have already performed a PCA, but i don't really know how to represent the variation of the metabolites in the 4 groups.

For example, i have the row of syringic acid present in the 4 groups (3 replicates each group) and in different quantities (area). The same for thousands of other metabolites.

My question is, which statistical test can i apply to this? The software already gives me an adjusted p-value for each row, but i don't understand where it comes from (maybe anova?).

Also for the graphical representation, of course i cannot make a barplot. What kind of plot could i use to represent at least the molecules that change significantly among the groups?

Thank you for reading me :)