Genomics-enabled analysis of specialized metabolism in bioenergy crops: current progress and challenges

Abstract Plants produce a staggering diversity of specialized small molecule metabolites that play vital roles in mediating environmental interactions and stress adaptation. This chemical diversity derives from dynamic biosynthetic pathway networks that are often species-specific and operate under tight spatiotemporal and environmental control. A growing divide between demand and environmental challenges in food and bioenergy crop production has intensified research on these complex metabolite networks and their contribution to crop fitness. High-throughput omics technologies provide access to ever-increasing data resources for investigating plant metabolism. However, the efficiency of using such system-wide data to decode the gene and enzyme functions controlling specialized metabolism has remained limited; due largely to the recalcitrance of many plants to genetic approaches and the lack of ‘user-friendly’ biochemical tools for studying the diverse enzyme classes involved in specialized metabolism. With emphasis on terpenoid metabolism in the bioenergy crop switchgrass as an example, this review aims to illustrate current advances and challenges in the application of DNA synthesis and synthetic biology tools for accelerating the functional discovery of genes, enzymes and pathways in plant specialized metabolism. These technologies have accelerated knowledge development on the biosynthesis and physiological roles of diverse metabolite networks across many ecologically and economically important plant species and can provide resources for application to precision breeding and natural product metabolic engineering.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Synthetic Biology

• Publication date

  2020-06-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/synbio/ysaa005PMID 32995549PMCID 7445794
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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