Stressing the importance of plant specialized metabolites: omics-based approaches for discovering specialized metabolism in plant stress responses

Mengxi Wu; Trent R Northen; Yezhang Ding

doi:10.3389/fpls.2023.1272363

Stressing the importance of plant specialized metabolites: omics-based approaches for discovering specialized metabolism in plant stress responses

Front Plant Sci. 2023 Nov 8:14:1272363. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1272363. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Mengxi Wu¹, Trent R Northen^{2

3}, Yezhang Ding³

Affiliations

¹ College of Landscape Architecture, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, China.
² Joint Genome Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, United States.
³ Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, United States.

Abstract

Plants produce a diverse range of specialized metabolites that play pivotal roles in mediating environmental interactions and stress adaptation. These unique chemical compounds also hold significant agricultural, medicinal, and industrial values. Despite the expanding knowledge of their functions in plant stress interactions, understanding the intricate biosynthetic pathways of these natural products remains challenging due to gene and pathway redundancy, multifunctionality of proteins, and the activity of enzymes with broad substrate specificity. In the past decade, substantial progress in genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics has made the exploration of plant specialized metabolism more feasible than ever before. Notably, recent advances in integrative multi-omics and computational approaches, along with other technologies, are accelerating the discovery of plant specialized metabolism. In this review, we present a summary of the recent progress in the discovery of plant stress-related specialized metabolites. Emphasis is placed on the application of advanced omics-based approaches and other techniques in studying plant stress-related specialized metabolism. Additionally, we discuss the high-throughput methods for gene functional characterization. These advances hold great promise for harnessing the potential of specialized metabolites to enhance plant stress resilience in the future.

Keywords: biosynthesis; biotic and abiotic stress; metabolomics; multi-omics; plant specialized metabolites.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. YD and TN are supported by the m-CAFEs Microbial Community Analysis & Functional Evaluation in Soils, (m-CAFEs@lbl.gov) a Science Focus Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological & Environmental Research DE-AC02-05CH11231, and MW also acknowledges support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological & Environmental Research under an Award DE-SC0021234 led by UC San Diego.