Plant Secondary Metabolites with Health Effects: Discovery and Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

Plant secondary metabolites include a plethora of organic compounds that plants synthetize for different reasons. The plant itself uses such compounds as antioxidants, defense mechanisms, hyperparasite attraction pheromones, weed controls, and antifungals. Furthermore, we have used plants’ active compounds as medicines for a long time. Indeed, Aristotle, in his treatise “Plants”, described the existence of a connection among the environment, nature, and plants. This connection, he said, is functional, i.e., each plant contains “something” that is functional for human health. Besides, each plant synthetizes a particular class of secondary metabolites that are important and serve as relief of a particular disease. Many clinical studies have demonstrated the importance of a specific plant metabolite to ameliorate a human medical condition. Traditional Chinese medicine has incorporated these known compounds into its pharmacopoeia. Occidental and American pharmacopoeia is dominated by Big Pharma, which looks back to the power of nature to re-adapt synthetic/semisynthetic drugs to mimic natural plant secondary metabolites. However, nowadays, in planta genetic engineering by introducing cognate wild type genes (lost by breeding) via cis-genesis and CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing is able to modify the plant secondary metabolite pathways in order to use the plants as a biofactory for the sustainable production of natural and metabolically forced/deviated metabolites, such as antioxidants, food colorants, fragrances, and anticancer natural compounds. In vitro and in vivo studies have demonstrated that many secondary metabolites are able to accumulate in the liver or in the skin and exert beneficial functions. However, toxicological studies demonstrate the importance of the dosage effects by introducing a titration of the active compounds from plants in pills/capsules containing the correct dosage for the plant metabolites after extraction, purification, and concentration. The modern medicinal/food chemistry industry is therefore looking forward to improvements in the production yield of particular plant secondary metabolites of known function, which can be achieved with chemical stability by in-plant biochemical modification, including genetic engineering of the biosynthetic pathway.

Dr. Giuseppe Dionisio
Prof. Dr. Vittorio Calabrese
Guest Editors

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