Aneklaphakij Chaiwat, Saigo Tomoki, Watanabe Mutsumi, Naake Thomas, Fernie Alisdair R, Bunsupa Somnuk, Satitpatipan Veena, Tohge Takayuki
Department of Pharmacognosy, Faculty of Pharmacy, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand.
Graduate School of Biological Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Ikoma, Japan.
Front Plant Sci. 2021 Apr 6;12:642581. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2021.642581. eCollection 2021.
Nuts, such as peanut, almond, and chestnut, are valuable food crops for humans being important sources of fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, and polyphenols. Polyphenols, such as flavonoids, stilbenoids, and hydroxycinnamates, represent a group of plant-specialized (secondary) metabolites which are characterized as health-beneficial antioxidants within the human diet as well as physiological stress protectants within the plant. In food chemistry research, a multitude of polyphenols contained in culinary nuts have been studied leading to the identification of their chemical properties and bioactivities. Although functional elucidation of the biosynthetic genes of polyphenols in nut species is crucially important for crop improvement in the creation of higher-quality nuts and stress-tolerant cultivars, the chemical diversity of nut polyphenols and the key biosynthetic genes responsible for their production are still largely uncharacterized. However, current technical advances in whole-genome sequencing have facilitated that nut plant species became model plants for omics-based approaches. Here, we review the chemical diversity of seed polyphenols in majorly consumed nut species coupled to insights into their biological activities. Furthermore, we present an example of the annotation of key genes involved in polyphenolic biosynthesis in peanut using comparative genomics as a case study outlining how we are approaching omics-based approaches of the nut plant species.
坚果，如花生、杏仁和栗子，是对人类有价值的粮食作物，是脂肪酸、维生素、矿物质和多酚的重要来源。多酚类物质，如黄酮类、芪类和羟基肉桂酸酯类，是一类植物特化（次生）代谢产物，在人类饮食中作为有益健康的抗氧化剂，在植物体内作为生理应激保护剂。在食品化学研究中，人们对烹饪用坚果中含有的多种多酚进行了研究，从而确定了它们的化学性质和生物活性。尽管对坚果物种中多酚生物合成基因的功能解析对于培育更高品质坚果和耐胁迫品种的作物改良至关重要，但坚果多酚的化学多样性以及负责其产生的关键生物合成基因在很大程度上仍未得到表征。然而，全基因组测序方面的当前技术进展促进了坚果植物物种成为基于组学方法的模式植物。在这里，我们综述了主要食用坚果物种种子多酚的化学多样性及其生物活性。此外，我们以花生为例，利用比较基因组学对参与多酚生物合成的关键基因进行注释，作为一个案例研究，概述我们如何采用基于组学的方法研究坚果植物物种。
