Plant Metabolic Engineering Essentials Quiz

Metabolism in Crops

• Metabolites are intermediate products of cellular metabolism catalyzed by various enzymes that naturally occur within cells.
• Metabolites can be categorized into two types: primary metabolites and secondary metabolites.

Primary Metabolites

• Primary metabolites are chemical compounds produced during growth and development processes.
• Examples of primary metabolites include carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids.
• They have physiological functions and are directly involved in normal growth, development, and reproduction.
• They are typically present in many organisms/cells and are also referred to as central metabolites.
• In higher plants, primary metabolites are often concentrated in seeds and vegetative storage organs and are needed for physiological development.

Secondary Metabolites

• Secondary metabolites are produced by plants but have no physiological functions.
• They have ecological importance and play a role in plant protection and defense against herbivores and other organisms.
• Examples of secondary metabolites include alkaloids, terpenoids, and lignins.
• They are often restricted to a narrow set of species within a phylogenetic group.

Metabolic Engineering

• Metabolic engineering involves the redirection of one or more enzymatic reactions to produce new compounds in an organism, improve the production of existing compounds, or mediate the degradation of compounds.
• It requires the development of basic biotechnological technologies such as cloning, promoter analysis, protein targeting, plant transformation, and genetic metabolism.

Plant Metabolism and Modern Agriculture

• Humans have exploited the plant synthesizing capability and developed agricultural practices to meet basic needs for food, fiber, energy, chemicals, and medicine.
• Plants can synthesize 5,000 to 25,000 different compounds.
• More than 100,000 metabolites have been identified in the plant kingdom.
• Plant metabolites provide energy, vitamins, and antioxidants, and are sources of nutritional and nutraceuticals for humans.

Plant Metabolism Engineering

• Plant metabolism engineering involves the direct improvement of product formation or cellular properties through the modification of specific biochemical reactions or the introduction of new ones using recombinant DNA technology.
• Why plants? They are cheaper and readily available, easy to grow, and provide a eukaryotic system.
• Plant cells are highly compartmentalized.

Strategies for Plant Metabolic Engineering

• Eliminating the activity of specific enzymes in a pathway using strategies such as identifying mutant genes, knocking out gene function, and interfering with protein function.
• Increasing flux of existing pathways using strategies such as manipulating the activity of "rate-limiting" steps, metabolic flux analysis and modeling, and expressing multiple genes in plants.

Plants as Bioreactors

• Plants can be used as bioreactors to produce a variety of products such as antibodies, edible vaccines, polymers, and pharmaceutical drugs.

Test your knowledge on essential elements and strategies in plant metabolic engineering, including overexpressing gene activity, introducing new pathways, and eliminating specific enzyme activity. Explore techniques like knocking out gene function and interfering with protein function using targeted RNA degradation.