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Crassocephalum crepidioides  is an African orphan crop that is used as a leafy vegetable and medicinal plant. Although it is of high regional importance in Sub-Saharan Africa, the plant is still mainly collected from the wild and therefore efforts are made to promote its domestication. However, in addition to beneficial properties, there was first evidence that  C. crepidioides  can accumulate the highly toxic pyrrolizidine alkaloid (PA) jacobine and here it was investigated, how jacobine production is controlled. Using ecotypes from Africa and Asia that were characterized in terms of their PA profiles, it is shown that the tetraploid  C. crepidioides  forms jacobine, an ability that its diploid close relative  Crassocephalum rubens  appears to lack. Evidence is provided that nitrogen (N) deficiency strongly increases jacobine in the leaves of  C. crepidioides , that this capacity depends more strongly on the shoot than the root system, and that homospermidine synthase (HSS) activity is not rate-limiting for this reaction. A characterization of  HSS  gene representation and transcription showed that  C. crepidioides  and  C. rubens  possess two functional versions, one of which is conserved, that the  HSS  transcript is mainly present in roots and that its abundance is not controlled by N deficiency. In summary, this work improves our understanding of how environmental cues impact PA biosynthesis in plants and provides a basis for the development of PA-free  C. crepidioides  cultivars, which will aid its domestication and safe use.

The Orphan Crop Crassocephalum crepidioides Accumulates the Pyrrolizidine Alkaloid Jacobine in Response to Nitrogen Starvation