Exploring the Evolvability of Plant Specialized Metabolism: Uniqueness Out Of Uniformity and Uniqueness Behind Uniformity.

ABSTRACT: The huge structural diversity exhibited by plant specialized metabolites has primarily been considered to result from the catalytic specificity of their biosynthetic enzymes. Accordingly, enzyme gene multiplication and functional differentiation through spontaneous mutations have been established as the molecular mechanisms that drive metabolic evolution. Nevertheless, how plants have assembled and maintained such metabolic enzyme genes and the typical clusters that are observed in plant genomes, as well as why identical specialized metabolites often exist in phylogenetically remote lineages, is currently only poorly explained by a concept known as convergent evolution. Here, we compile recent knowledge on the co-presence of metabolic modules that are common in the plant kingdom but have e

SUBMITTER: Ono E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10734894 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature