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Unraveling the roles of plant specialized metabolites: using synthetic biology to design molecular biosensors
Author(s) -
Garagounis Constantine,
Delkis Nikolaos,
Papadopoulou Kalliope K.
Publication year - 2021
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.17470
Subject(s) - biology , computational biology , synthetic biology , mechanism (biology) , plant development , plant metabolism , systems biology , plant growth , biochemical engineering , microbiology and biotechnology , biochemistry , gene , botany , rna , philosophy , epistemology , engineering
Summary Plants are a rich source of specialized metabolites with a broad range of bioactivities and many applications in human daily life. Over the past decades significant progress has been made in identifying many such metabolites in different plant species and in elucidating their biosynthetic pathways. However, the biological roles of plant specialized metabolites remain elusive and proposed functions lack an identified underlying molecular mechanism. Understanding the roles of specialized metabolites frequently is hampered by their dynamic production and their specific spatiotemporal accumulation within plant tissues and organs throughout a plant’s life cycle. In this review, we propose the employment of strategies from the field of Synthetic Biology to construct and optimize genetically encoded biosensors that can detect individual specialized metabolites in a standardized and high‐throughput manner. This will help determine the precise localization of specialized metabolites at the tissue and single‐cell levels. Such information will be useful in developing complete system‐level models of specialized plant metabolism, which ultimately will demonstrate how the biosynthesis of specialized metabolites is integrated with the core processes of plant growth and development.