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Review
. 2023 Nov 8:14:1272363.
doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1272363. eCollection 2023.

Stressing the importance of plant specialized metabolites: omics-based approaches for discovering specialized metabolism in plant stress responses

Mengxi Wu  1 , Trent R Northen  2   3 , Yezhang Ding  3
Affiliations
Review

Stressing the importance of plant specialized metabolites: omics-based approaches for discovering specialized metabolism in plant stress responses

Mengxi Wu et al. Front Plant Sci. .

Abstract

Plants produce a diverse range of specialized metabolites that play pivotal roles in mediating environmental interactions and stress adaptation. These unique chemical compounds also hold significant agricultural, medicinal, and industrial values. Despite the expanding knowledge of their functions in plant stress interactions, understanding the intricate biosynthetic pathways of these natural products remains challenging due to gene and pathway redundancy, multifunctionality of proteins, and the activity of enzymes with broad substrate specificity. In the past decade, substantial progress in genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and proteomics has made the exploration of plant specialized metabolism more feasible than ever before. Notably, recent advances in integrative multi-omics and computational approaches, along with other technologies, are accelerating the discovery of plant specialized metabolism. In this review, we present a summary of the recent progress in the discovery of plant stress-related specialized metabolites. Emphasis is placed on the application of advanced omics-based approaches and other techniques in studying plant stress-related specialized metabolism. Additionally, we discuss the high-throughput methods for gene functional characterization. These advances hold great promise for harnessing the potential of specialized metabolites to enhance plant stress resilience in the future.

Keywords: biosynthesis; biotic and abiotic stress; metabolomics; multi-omics; plant specialized metabolites.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Major classes of plant specialized metabolites and their biological functions. The major classes of plant specialized metabolites, including phenylpropanoids, terpenes, alkaloids, and other specialized metabolites are displayed. Specialized metabolites play crucial roles in protecting plants against both abiotic stresses (e.g., light, heat, drought, cold, flood, salinity, and metals) and biotic stresses (e.g., pests and pathogens).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Overview of omics-based approaches for specialized metabolism discovery in plants. Single and combination of omics approaches, including metabolomics, genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics as well as integrative multi-omics, greatly accelerate the discovery of plant specialized metabolism. mGWAS, metabolite-based genome-wide association analysis; TWAS, transcriptome-wide association analysis.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Schematic overview of high throughput approaches for characterization of candidate biosynthetic genes. The figure was created with BioRender.com.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. YD and TN are supported by the m-CAFEs Microbial Community Analysis & Functional Evaluation in Soils, (m-CAFEs@lbl.gov) a Science Focus Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological & Environmental Research DE-AC02-05CH11231, and MW also acknowledges support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological & Environmental Research under an Award DE-SC0021234 led by UC San Diego.