Evolutionary routes to biochemical innovation revealed by integrative analysis of a plant-defense related specialized metabolic pathway
- Michigan State University, United States
Abstract
The diversity of life on Earth is a result of continual innovations in molecular networks influencing morphology and physiology. Plant specialized metabolism produces hundreds of thousands of compounds, offering striking examples of these innovations. To understand how this novelty is generated, we investigated the evolution of the Solanaceae family-specific, trichome-localized acylsugar biosynthetic pathway using a combination of mass spectrometry, RNA-seq, enzyme assays, RNAi and phylogenomics in different non-model species. Our results reveal hundreds of acylsugars produced across the Solanaceae family and even within a single plant, built on simple sugar cores. The relatively short biosynthetic pathway experienced repeated cycles of innovation over the last 100 million years that include gene duplication and divergence, gene loss, evolution of substrate preference and promiscuity. This study provides mechanistic insights into the emergence of plant chemical novelty, and offers a template for investigating the ~300,000 non-model plant species that remain underexplored.
Data availability
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RNA seq reads from Solanaceae Spp.Publicly available at the NCBI BioProject (accession no: PRJNA263038).
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Data from: Multi-omic analysis of a hyper-diverse plant metabolic pathway reveals evolutionary routes to biological innovationAvailable at Dryad Digital Repository under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Science Foundation (IOS-1025636)
- A Daniel Jones
- Robert L Last
National Institutes of Health (T32-GM110523)
- Bryan J Leong
- Robert L Last
U.S. Department of Agriculture (MICL-02143)
- A Daniel Jones
National Science Foundation (IOS-PGRP-1546617)
- A Daniel Jones
- Robert L Last
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Moghe et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Evolutionary routes to biochemical innovation revealed by integrative analysis of a plant-defense related specialized metabolic pathway
eLife 6:e28468.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.28468
