Computational Tools for the Discovery of Novel Specialized Metabolic Pathways in Plants

Plants produce a wide variety of secondary metabolites: chemical compounds that play key roles as toxins in their defence against pathogens and insects, as scents and pigments to attract pollinators and as signalling molecules to communicate with other plants, animals and microbes. However, only very few of their biosynthetic pathways have been identified, and the mechanisms underpinning metabolic diversification in evolution are largely unknown. The recent accumulation of genomic, transcriptomic and metabolomic data provides new opportunities. Here, I will describe computational tools that leverage diverse types of omics data to identify plant biosynthetic pathways and analyze their diversity and evolution, and outline the prospects of leveraging the results for pathway engineering in synthetic biology.