Secondary Metabolism in Plants and Plant Cells

Dear Colleagues,

Throughout the history of humankind, plants have served as a crucial source of nutrition, health, and well-being for humans. Still today, plants form an important part of healing and prevention of diseases, as according to World Health Organization, 80% of the world’s population is using plant-derived medicines as a form of primary healthcare. This poses a clear threat to plant biodiversity, since the majority of medicinal plants used currently are collected from the wild, and only a fraction are cultivated plants. There is around 400,000 plant species in the world, and estimates of the numbers of secondary metabolites produced and characterized by them vary from a couple of hundreds of thousands up to a million. Secondary compounds are historically called secondary to differentiate them from primary compounds, which are directly involved in plant growth, development, and reproduction. However, secondary metabolites are crucial for plant survival when competing in surrounding environments in various ways—fighting against herbivores and pathogens, an attracting pollinators and protection against harmful radiation, to mention a few. Largely, however, it is still obscure why and how plants produce such diversified chemicals and what their functions are in plants reflecting evolutional events. Current technologies allow broader, more detailed, and more rapid studies of phytochemistry through novel functional genomics tools, but there is a long way ahead with a huge diversity of plants. To date, only a few hundred whole genome sequences of vascular plant species have been published, covering less than a 0.5 percent of total plant species. As the costs of genome sequencing are coming down, the major bottlenecks in plant genome studies are still in data processing, assembly, and annotation. The question is, how can one further apply this knowledge to biotechnology? Only through the knowhow of the biosynthesis processes of these compounds in plants is there a possibility to create a rational platform for sustainable use for plant secondary metabolites. Unraveling the biosynthetic pathways of plant secondary metabolites, combined with advanced metabolic engineering tools and synthetic biology approaches, plant secondary metabolite pathways have also been successfully incorporated to microbial hosts. 

In this Special Issue, we welcome original research papers, methods, reviews, and perspectives related to plant secondary metabolism in general, and particularly covering the topics of:

• Secondary metabolite biosynthesis;
• Biotechnological and industrial production of secondary metabolites;
• Secondary compounds in biotransformation and phytotransformation;
• Plant functional genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics;
• Combinatorial biochemistry for plant secondary metabolite production.

Dr. Suvi T. Häkkinen
Dr. Kirsi-Marja Oksman-Caldentey
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Plants is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• plant
• secondary metabolism
• secondary compounds
• biosynthesis
• phytotransformation
• medicinal plants
• functional genomics
• genome editing
• metabolic engineering