Flavonoids represent a diversified family of phenylpropanoid-derived plant secondary metabolites.They are widely found in fruits, vegetables and medicinal herbs and plants. There has been increasing interest on flavonoids because of their proven bioactivity associated with anti-obesity, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic activity and the prevention of aging-related chronic conditions, such as nervous and cardiovascular disease. Low bioavailability of flavonoids is a major challenge restricting their wide applications. Due to safety and economic issues, traditional plant extraction or chemical synthesis could not provide a scalable route for large-scale production of flavonoids. Alternatively, reconstruction of biosynthetic gene clusters in plants and industrially relevant microbes offer significant promise for discovery and scalable synthesis of flavonoids.This review provides an update on biotechnological production of flavonoids. We summarized the recent advances on plant metabolic engineering, microbial host and genetically encoded biosensors. Plant metabolic engineering holds the promise to improve the yield of specific flavonoids and expand the chemical space of novel flavonoids. The choice of microbial host provides the cellular chassis that could be tailored for various stereo-or regio-selective chemistries that are crucial for their bioactivities. When coupled with transcriptional biosensing, genetically encoded biosensors could be welded into cellular metabolism to achieve high throughput screening or dynamic carbon flux re-allocation to deliver efficient and robust microbial workhorse. The convergence of these technologies will translate the vast majority of plant genetic resources into valuable flavonoids with pharmaceutical/nutraceutical values in the foreseeable future.

Although the Cornelian Cherry is widely grown in the north-eastern areas of Iran, it is not recognized as an important fruit crop as are many other fruit species. Large variability has been observed in all morphological and chemical compositions under study. Fruit weight varied from 1.499 to 3.29 g, whereas seed weight ranged from 0.249 to 0.425 g. The average lengths of fruits were between 15.22 and 22.31 mm, and the average widths of them were between 10.26-16.3 mm. The content of ascorbic acid ranged from 240-360 mg/ 100 g fresh weight. The total soluble solids and total acidity were 5-12.5% and 0.43-1.86% respectively. Grouping of Cornelian Cherry accessions based on 5 factors was performed and were divided into three sub-clusters. The results obtained from this study might be helpful for Cornelian Cherry breeders trying to develop new genotypes and varieties.

A comparison among two forms of half-diallel analysis was made. The different half-diallel techniques used were Griffing's model I, method 2 and 4. These methods of diallel analysis were found to be interrelated. However, as Griffing's model I, method 4 partitioned heterosis into different components as well as gave information about combining ability and this method had certainly some advantages over the other. The results further indicated using parental generations in the second Griffing method may cause biased estimate of the GCA and SCA variances. Thus, using the fourth Griffing method is more suitable than the other methods in providing time, cost, and facilities, and it is recommended as an applicable method.

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