Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Curr Opin Plant Biol. 2012 Aug;15(4):415-23. doi: 10.1016/j.pbi.2012.05.005. Epub 2012 Jun 8.
Plants have adapted to their environments by diversifying in various ways. This diversification is reflected at the phytochemical level in their production of numerous specialized secondary metabolites that provide protection against biotic and abiotic stresses. Plant speciation is therefore intimately linked to metabolic diversification, yet we do not currently have a deep understanding of how new metabolic pathways evolve. Recent evidence indicates that genes for individual secondary metabolic pathways can be either distributed throughout the genome or clustered, but the relative frequencies of these two pathway organizations remain to be established. While it is possible that clustering is a feature of pathways that have evolved in recent evolutionary time, the answer to this and how dispersed and clustered pathways may be related remain to be addressed. Recent advances enabled by genomics and systems biology are beginning to yield the first insights into network evolution in plant metabolism. This review focuses on recent progress in understanding the evolution of clustered and dispersed pathways for new secondary metabolites in plants.
植物通过各种方式多样化来适应其环境。这种多样化在植物化学水平上反映为它们产生了许多专门的次生代谢产物，这些产物为它们提供了抵御生物和非生物胁迫的保护。因此，植物的物种形成与代谢多样化密切相关，但我们目前还没有深入了解新的代谢途径是如何进化的。最近的证据表明，单个次生代谢途径的基因要么分布在整个基因组中，要么聚集在一起，但这两种途径组织的相对频率仍有待确定。虽然聚集可能是最近进化过程中进化的途径的特征，但这个问题的答案以及分散和聚集的途径如何相关，仍有待解决。基因组学和系统生物学的最新进展开始为植物代谢网络进化提供初步见解。这篇综述重点介绍了近年来在理解植物中新次生代谢物的聚集和分散途径的进化方面取得的进展。
