| Abstract Detail
Tuesday Afternoon Ecology and Adaptation Pichersky, Eran [1]. How Plants Evolve to Make Specialized Metabolites. IN addition to the standard repertoire of metabolites that all plant species synthesize as part of the common metabolic pathways, defined as “primary metabolism”, different plant lineages also make myriad other compounds, sometimes referred to as “secondary metabolites”. These specialized compounds serve in ecological roles unique to each taxa. In the aggregate, plants make many more specialized than primary metabolites, but each plant species makes only a small subset of unique compounds. It follows that the genes and enzymes for specialized metabolites are quite divergent among plant species. Recent work has shown that plant specialized metabolites are synthesized by chemical elaboration of primary metabolites involving cleavage, oxidation/hydroxylation, reduction, methylation and acylation reactions. Each species’ genome often has multiple genes encoding enzymes that carry out similar reactions with different substrates. This intragenomic diversity is generated by gene duplications and divergence. Changes in preferred substrate of these enzymes may occur through minimal changes of critical residues. Similar processes are also responsible for the different sets of compounds produced by different species. Solanaceae species produce a large variety of specialized metabolites, and the genetic, genomic, and biochemical tools developed for this family make it an excellent system to study the function and evolution of the enzymes responsible for the synthesis of such compounds.
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1 - University of Michigan, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, 830 N. University St., Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA
Keywords:
Biochemistry
Secondary metabolism
Genomics.
Session: SOL05-3
Location: Ballroom AB/Monona Terrace
Date: Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
Time: 2:30 PM
Abstract ID:39 |
