Biosynthetic Intermediate Probes for Visualizing and Identifying the Biosynthetic Enzymes of Plant Metabolites

Abstract

Plant metabolites play important roles in both plant physiology and drug discovery. Taking advantage of new emerging technologies such as next generation sequencing (NGS), whole genome assembly, bioinformatics, omics-based strategies have been demonstrated as popular and powerful ways to elucidate complex metabolic pathways in plants. In this viewpoint, biosynthetic intermediates probes have been proposed as the potentinal tools to study the plant natural product biosynthesis via chemical proteomics appoaches or transcriptome analysis.

Keywords: biosynthetic intermediate probes; fluorescence imaging; mass spectrometric imaging; plant metabolites; target identification.