No abstract

Plant secondary metabolites (SMs) play important roles in plant survival and in creating ecological connections between other species. In addition to providing a variety of valuable natural products, secondary metabolites help protect plants against pathogenic attacks and environmental stresses. Given their sessile nature, plants must protect themselves from such situations through accumulation of these bioactive compounds. Indeed, secondary metabolites act as herbivore deterrents, barriers against pathogen invasion, and mitigators of oxidative stress. The accumulation of SMs are highly dependent on environmental factors such as light, temperature, soil water, soil fertility, and salinity. For most plants, a change in an individual environmental factor can alter the content of secondary metabolites even if other factors remain constant. In this review, we focus on how individual environmental factors affect the accumulation of secondary metabolites in plants during both biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Furthermore, we discuss the application of abiotic and biotic elicitors in culture systems as well as their stimulating effects on the accumulation of secondary metabolites. Specifically, we discuss the shikimate pathway and the aromatic amino acids produced in this pathway, which are the precursors of a range of secondary metabolites including terpenoids, alkaloids, and sulfur- and nitrogen-containing compounds. We also detail how the biosynthesis of important metabolites is altered by several genes related to secondary metabolite biosynthesis pathways. Genes responsible for secondary metabolite biosynthesis in various plant species during stress conditions are regulated by transcriptional factors such as WRKY, MYB, AP2/ERF, bZIP, bHLH, and NAC, which are also discussed here.

Phytobeneficial microbes, particularly endophytes, such as fungi and bacteria, are concomitant partners of plants throughout its developmental stages, including seed germination, root and stem growth, and fruiting. Endophytic microbes have been identified in plants that grow in a wide array of habitats; however, seed-borne endophytic microbes have not been fully explored yet. Seed-borne endophytes are of great interest because of their vertical transmission; their potential to produce various phytohormones, enzymes, antimicrobial compounds, and other secondary metabolites; and improve plant biomass and yield under biotic and abiotic stresses. This review addresses the current knowledge on endophytes, their ability to produce metabolites, and their influence on plant growth and stress mitigation.

No abstract

Nicotiana otophora is a wild parental species of Nicotiana tabacum, an interspecific hybrid of Nicotiana tomentosiformis and Nicotiana sylvestris. However, N. otophora is least understood as an alternative paternal donor. Here, we compared the fully assembled chloroplast (cp) genome of N. otophora and with those of closely related species. The analysis showed a cp genome size of 156,073 bp and exhibited a typical quadripartite structure, which contains a pair of inverted repeats separated by small and large single copies, containing 163 representative genes, with 165 microsatellites distributed unevenly throughout the genome. Comparative analysis of a gene with known function across Nicotiana species revealed 76 protein-coding sequences, 20 tRNA sequences, and 3 rRNA sequence shared between the cp genomes. The analysis revealed that N. otophora is a sister species to N. tomentosiformis within the Nicotiana genus, and Atropha belladonna and Datura stramonium are their closest relatives. These findings provide a valuable analysis of the complete N. otophora cp genome, which can identify species, elucidate taxonomy, and reconstruct the phylogeny of genus Nicotiana.