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Abstract The Plant Metabolic Network (PMN) is a free online database of plant metabolism available at https://plantcyc.org. The latest release, PMN 16, provides metabolic databases representing >1200 metabolic pathways, 1.3 million enzymes, >8000 metabolites, >10 000 reactions and >15 000 citations for 155 plant and green algal genomes, as well as a pan-plant reference database called PlantCyc. This release contains 29 additional genomes compared with PMN 15, including species listed by the African Orphan Crop Consortium and nonflowering plant species. Furthermore, 52 new enzymes with experimentally supported function information have been included in this release. The single-species databases contain a combination of experimental information from the literature and computationally predicted information obtained through PMN’s database generation pipeline for a single species, while PlantCyc contains only experimental information but for any species within Viridiplantae. PMN is a comprehensive resource for querying, visualizing, analyzing and interpreting omics data with metabolic knowledge. It also serves as a useful and interactive tool for teaching plant metabolism. 

Abstract The diversity of plant natural products presents a rich resource for accelerating drug discovery and addressing pressing human health issues. However, the challenges in accessing and cultivating source species, as well as metabolite structural complexity, and general low abundance present considerable hurdles in developing plant-derived therapeutics. Advances in high-throughput sequencing, genome assembly, gene synthesis, analytical technologies, and synthetic biology approaches, now enable us to efficiently identify and engineer enzymes and metabolic pathways for producing natural and new-to-nature therapeutics and drug candidates. This review highlights challenges and progress in plant natural product discovery and engineering by example of recent breakthroughs in identifying the missing enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of the anti-cancer agent Taxol^®. These enzyme resources offer new avenues for the bio-manufacture and semi-synthesis of an old blockbuster drug. 

Summary Diverse networks of specialized metabolites promote plant fitness by mediating beneficial and antagonistic environmental interactions. In maize (Zea mays), constitutive and dynamically formed cocktails of terpenoids, benzoxazinoids, oxylipins, and phenylpropanoids contribute to plant defense and ecological adaptation. Recent research has highlighted the multifunctional nature of many specialized metabolites, serving not only as elaborate chemical defenses that safeguard against biotic and abiotic stress but also as regulators in adaptive developmental processes and microbiome interactions. Great strides have also been made in identifying the modular pathway networks that drive maize chemical diversity. Translating this knowledge into strategies for enhancing stress resilience traits has the potential to address climate‐driven yield losses in one of the world's major food, feed, and bioenergy crops. 

The cereal scutellum is a hub for diverse specialized defense metabolism and pathway discovery. 

Abstract Plants deploy both primary and species-specific, specialized metabolites to communicate with other organisms and adapt to environmental challenges, including interactions with soil-dwelling microbial communities. However, the role of specialized metabolites in modulating plant-microbiome interactions often remains elusive. In this study, we report that maize (Zea mays) diterpenoid metabolites with known antifungal bioactivities also influence rhizosphere bacterial communities. Metabolite profiling showed that dolabralexins, antibiotic diterpenoids that are highly abundant in roots of some maize varieties, can be exuded from the roots. Comparative 16S rRNA gene sequencing determined the bacterial community composition of the maize mutantZman2(anther ear 2), which is deficient in dolabralexins and closely related bioactive kauralexin diterpenoids. TheZman2rhizosphere microbiome differed significantly from the wild-type sibling with the most significant changes observed for Alphaproteobacteria of the order Sphingomonadales. Metabolomics analyses support that these differences are attributed to the diterpenoid deficiency of theZman2mutant, rather than other large-scale metabolome alterations. Together, these findings support physiological functions of maize diterpenoids beyond known chemical defenses, including the assembly of the rhizosphere microbiome.