Secondary Metabolite Pathways in Medicinal Plants: Approaches in Reconstruction and Analysis

Abstract

Medicinal plants are the abundant source of varied secondary metabolites with important therapeutic properties. These plants and their extracts have been the basis of several traditional medicines and their usage and demand has grown ever since. This ever increasing fetish has attracted plant biologists, who in the past two decades have made enormous efforts towards exploring and engineering the biosynthetic pathways of these sparsely available molecules. Until recently, endeavors to unravel biosynthetic pathways were limited mainly due to limited plant genomics resources. However, recent advancements in generating high-throughput “omics” datasets, computational tools, functional genomics approaches and analytical methods, along with their seamless integration have leads to the explanation of biosynthetic pathways enormous plant bio-active metabolites. Researchers have gone a step ahead in creating alternative sustainable source of these biomolecules through synthetic biology approaches, thereby developing microbial systems producing plant origin bioactive metabolites. Here, we have reviewed the contributions of major biotechnological approaches and their integration towards elucidating, analyzing and reconstructing biosynthetic pathways of bioactive metabolites in plants. We have briefly discussed different approaches that utilize omics datasets to extract biologically relevant knowledge with intentions to build in depth understanding of metabolic models of secondary metabolite biosynthesis.