Plant specialized terpenoids are natural products that have no obvious role in growth and development, but play many important functional roles to improve the plant's overall fitness. Besides, plant specialized terpenoids have immense value to humans due to their applications in fragrance, flavor, cosmetic, and biofuel industries. Understanding the fundamental aspects involved in the biosynthesis and regulation of these high-value molecules in plants not only paves the path to enhance plant traits, but also facilitates homologous or heterologous engineering for overproduction of target molecules of importance. Recent developments in functional genomics and high-throughput analytical techniques have led to unraveling of several novel aspects involved in the biosynthesis and regulation of plant specialized terpenoids. The knowledge thus derived has been successfully utilized to produce target specialized terpenoids of plant origin in homologous or heterologous host systems by metabolic engineering and synthetic biology approaches. Here, we provide an overview and highlights on advances related to the biosynthetic steps, regulation, and metabolic engineering of plant specialized terpenoids.

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植物特化萜类化合物的生物合成、调控和代谢工程进展

植物特化萜类化合物是天然产物，对生长发育没有明显作用，但在提高植物整体适应性方面发挥着许多重要的功能作用。此外，植物专用萜类化合物因其在香料、香精、化妆品和生物燃料行业中的应用而对人类具有巨大价值。了解植物中这些高价值分子的生物合成和调控所涉及的基本方面，不仅为增强植物性状铺平了道路，而且还促进了同源或异源工程以过度生产重要的目标分子。功能基因组学和高通量分析技术的最新发展已导致对涉及植物特化萜类化合物生物合成和调控的几个新方面的揭示。由此获得的知识已成功用于通过代谢工程和合成生物学方法在同源或异源宿主系统中生产植物来源的目标特化萜类化合物。在这里，我们概述和重点介绍了与植物专用萜类化合物的生物合成步骤、调控和代谢工程相关的进展。