The Chemical Vocabulary of Plants: Specialized Metabolites Defend Against Transient Threats

Some of the best chemists in the world aren't humans, they're plants. Now, scientists are unraveling the astounding chemical vocabulary of plants, revealing how they defend themselves while rooted to one location.

Plants can synthesize tens of thousands of compounds from thousands of genes. The chemicals, known as specialized metabolites, allow plants to withstand transient threats from their environment. In addition, some of these same compounds benefit humans; many drugs are derived from plant specialized metabolites.

In order to understand how plants evolved this particular chemical vocabulary, the researchers conducted a large-scale comparative analysis of plant genomes. The created a computation pipeline system that can transform a sequenced plant genome into a representation of the organism's metabolism, known as a metabolic network.

"The key to our analysis, or any comparative analysis, is the consistency and quality of the data across species," said Lee Chae, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Our pipeline ensures this consistency with validated levels of accuracy and coverage."

In all, the researchers reconstructed and analyzed metabolic networks for 16 species in the green plant lineage. These include flowering plants, algae and masses. In the end, the scientists discovered that genes producing specialized metabolites exhibit unusual properties in the way they evolved, including the number and organization within each genome. The findings could potentially offer a new way to find novel specialized metabolites, which could have wide-ranging implications for many research fields.

"Despite our reliance on plant compounds for health and well-being, we know very little about how they are produced or the true extent of their diversity in nature," said Seung Yon Rhee, one of the researchers, in a news release. "We hope that our findings will enable researchers to use these signatures as a tool to discover previously unknown specialized metabolites, to investigate how they benefit the plant, and to determine how they might benefit us."

The findings are published in the journal Science.