Molecular regulation of the key specialized metabolism pathways in medicinal plants

Abstract

The basis of modern pharmacology is the human ability to exploit the production of specialized metabolites from medical plants, for example, terpenoids, alkaloids, and phenolic acids. However, in most cases, the availability of these valuable compounds is limited by cellular or organelle barriers or spatio‐temporal accumulation patterns within different plant tissues. Transcription factors (TFs) regulate biosynthesis of these specialized metabolites by tightly controlling the expression of biosynthetic genes. Cutting‐edge technologies and/or combining multiple strategies and approaches have been applied to elucidate the role of TFs. In this review, we focus on recent progress in the transcription regulation mechanism of representative high‐value products and describe the transcriptional regulatory network, and future perspectives are discussed, which will help develop high‐yield plant resources.

Metabolic and Transcriptomic Profile Revealing the Differential Accumulating Mechanism in Different Parts of Dendrobium nobile

“…But almost no metabolic enzyme-coding genes were found to be the core of their accumulation. These results strongly indicated that some other factors affected the differential accumulation of medicinal components in D. nobile in addition to the metabolic-enzyme coding genes [18]. So, the effects of TFs and transporters were further analyzed.…”

“…In medicinal plants, TFs regulates the spatio-temporal accumulation patterns of some specialized metabolites, such as terpenoids, alkaloids, and phenolic acids, within different plant tissues [18]. Here, many TF subfamilies showed positive or negative effects on the accumulation of some specialized metabolites in different parts of D. nobile.…”