Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, B-9052, Ghent, Belgium; VIB Center for Plant Systems Biology, B-9052, Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Ghent University, B-9052, Ghent, Belgium; VIB Center for Plant Systems Biology, B-9052, Ghent, Belgium; Department of Botany and Zoology, Stellenbosch University, Private Bag X1, Matieland, 7600, South Africa.
Curr Opin Plant Biol. 2024 Oct;81:102575. doi: 10.1016/j.pbi.2024.102575. Epub 2024 Jun 19.
Although plant metabolic engineering enables the sustainable production of valuable metabolites with many applications, we still lack a good understanding of many multi-layered regulatory networks that govern metabolic pathways at the metabolite, protein, transcriptional and cellular level. As transcriptional regulation is better understood and often reviewed, here we highlight recent advances in the cell type-specific and post-translational regulation of plant specialized metabolism. With the advent of single-cell technologies, we are now able to characterize metabolites and their transcriptional regulators at the cellular level, which can refine our searches for missing biosynthetic enzymes and cell type-specific regulators. Post-translational regulation through enzyme inhibition, protein phosphorylation and ubiquitination are clearly evident in specialized metabolism regulation, but not frequently studied or considered in metabolic engineering efforts. Finally, we contemplate how advances in cell type-specific and post-translational regulation can be applied in metabolic engineering efforts in planta, leading to optimization of plants as metabolite production vehicles.
尽管植物代谢工程能够可持续地生产具有多种应用价值的有价值代谢物，但我们仍然缺乏对许多多层次调控网络的深入了解，这些网络在代谢物、蛋白质、转录和细胞水平上调控代谢途径。由于转录调控的理解程度更高，并且经常被审查，因此在这里我们重点介绍植物特化代谢物在细胞类型特异性和翻译后调控方面的最新进展。随着单细胞技术的出现，我们现在能够在细胞水平上对代谢物及其转录调节剂进行表征，这可以细化我们对缺失生物合成酶和细胞类型特异性调节剂的搜索。在特化代谢物的调控中，酶抑制、蛋白质磷酸化和泛素化等翻译后调控是显而易见的，但在代谢工程研究中并不经常研究或考虑。最后，我们思考如何将细胞类型特异性和翻译后调控方面的进展应用于植物中的代谢工程研究，从而优化植物作为代谢产物生产载体。
