Plant natural products

Plants produce a rich and diverse array of natural products. These compounds have important ecological functions, such as protecting against pests, diseases, ultraviolet-B damage and other environmental stresses. They are also exploited as pharmaceutical drugs, agrochemicals, within the food and drink industry, and for a wide variety of other industrial biotechnology applications.

Although plants are potentially a tremendous source of diverse and valuable natural products, identifying the pathways for the synthesis of these compounds is more complicated than in microbes because the genomes are larger and more complex. However, advances in sequencing technology, coupled with the recent discovery that the genes for natural product pathways are in many cases organised in operon-like clusters within plant genomes, now make it possible to access the genes and enzymes of specialised metabolism in plants far more readily. This allows for the harnessing of metabolic diversity using synthetic biology approaches, hence OpenPlant is generating genetic toolkits for the synthesis and modification of plant natural products.