Harnessing plant metabolic diversity

Plants produce a tremendous array of natural products, including medicines, flavours, fragrances, pigments and insecticides.  The vast majority of this metabolic diversity is as yet untapped, despite its huge potential value for humankind.  So far research into natural products for the development of drugs, antibiotics and other useful chemicals has tended to focus on microbes, where genome sequencing has revolutionised natural product discovery through mining for gene clusters for new metabolic pathways.  Identifying novel natural product pathways in plants is extremely difficult because plant genomes are much larger and more complex than those of microbes.  However, the recent discovery that genes for some types of plant natural product pathways are organised as physical clusters is now enabling systematic mining of plant genomes in the quest for new pathways and chemistries. Improved understanding of the genomic organization of different types of specialized metabolic pathways will shed light on the mechanisms underpinning pathway and genome evolution.  It will further open up unprecedented opportunities for exploiting Nature’s chemical toolkit by providing grist for the synthetic biology mill.