Dear Colleagues,

Plants produce a myriad of specialized (secondary) metabolites with a multitude of biological roles such as conferring light/UV protection, providing color patterns as visual aids for pollination or seed dispersal, regulating plant development, and being part of pathogen defense responses. Aside from these roles, specialized metabolites are of major interest for human nutrition and health. The major pathways of secondary metabolism are those producing isoprenoids, phenylpropanoids, alkaloids, and polyketides. The comprehension of their biosynthesis and regulation has acquired major advances mostly nurtured from reverse and forward genetics approaches in several plant species, which have given access to both structural and regulatory genes of these pathways. This knowledge has been particularly relevant for establishing strategies for breeding and altering metabolite content in crops or engineering plants used for biofuels. However, major advances have only been addressed for conserved pathways across the plant kingdom and those restricted to certain species have been somehow less studied. We also still lack information on how these pathways are precisely fine-tuned, how the metabolites are conjugated, transported and accumulated, or how different specialized metabolisms may compete for carbon-flux or uptake of primary metabolites. The understanding of these mechanisms should benefit from a multidisciplinary approach involving strong computational analyses of big data being currently generated. This Special Issue welcomes the submission of scientific articles focused on the deciphering of the fine regulation of specialized metabolism in different plant species by using different approaches, including the integration of multi-omics data. We especially welcome experimental studies proving mechanistic insights into how specialized metabolites are being tightly regulated, including compartmentalization. Studies in crops, model species, and plant cell culture models will be considered, as well as fully-computational studies not necessarily involving experimental activities. Reviews or Articles are also welcome.

Note: For experimental studies involving omics data analyses it is mandatory that they include at least three biological replicates.

Dr. Roque Bru-Martinez
Dr. Giulia Malacarne
Dr. José Tomás Matus
Guest Editors

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