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Plant metabolic clusters – from genetics to genomics
Author(s) -
Nützmann HansWilhelm,
Huang Ancheng,
Osbourn Anne
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
new phytologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.742
H-Index - 244
eISSN - 1469-8137
pISSN - 0028-646X
DOI - 10.1111/nph.13981
Subject(s) - natural product , expediting , biology , computational biology , genome , genomics , gene , metabolic pathway , microbiology and biotechnology , genetics , engineering , biochemistry , systems engineering
Summary Plant natural products are of great value for agriculture, medicine and a wide range of other industrial applications. The discovery of new plant natural product pathways is currently being revolutionized by two key developments. First, breakthroughs in sequencing technology and reduced cost of sequencing are accelerating the ability to find enzymes and pathways for the biosynthesis of new natural products by identifying the underlying genes. Second, there are now multiple examples in which the genes encoding certain natural product pathways have been found to be grouped together in biosynthetic gene clusters within plant genomes. These advances are now making it possible to develop strategies for systematically mining multiple plant genomes for the discovery of new enzymes, pathways and chemistries. Increased knowledge of the features of plant metabolic gene clusters – architecture, regulation and assembly – will be instrumental in expediting natural product discovery. This review summarizes progress in this area.ContentsSummary 771 I. Introduction 771 II. Plant metabolic gene clusters – some rules and anomalies 772 III. Cluster regulation 780 IV. Why are the genes clustered? 781 V. Conclusions and outlook 786Acknowledgements 786References 786