For millennia, humans have used plants for food, raw materials, and medicines, but only within the past two centuries have we begun to connect particular plant metabolites with specific properties and utilities. Since the utility of classical molecular genetics beyond model species is limited, the vast specialized metabolic systems present in the Earth's flora remain largely unstudied. With an explosion in genomics resources and a rapidly expanding toolbox over the past decade, exploration of plant specialized metabolism in nonmodel species is becoming more feasible than ever before. We review the state-of-the-art tools that have enabled this rapid progress. We present recent examples of de novo biosynthetic pathway discovery that employ various innovative approaches. We also draw attention to the higher-order organization of plant specialized metabolism at subcellular, cellular, tissue, interorgan, and interspecies levels, which will have important implications for the future design of comprehensive metabolic engineering strategies. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Plant Biology, Volume 71 is April 29, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

中文翻译：

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探索后基因组时代植物特化代谢的未知领域

几千年来，人类一直将植物用作食物、原材料和药物，但直到过去两个世纪，我们才开始将特定的植物代谢物与特定的特性和效用联系起来。由于模型物种以外的经典分子遗传学的效用有限，地球植物群中存在的大量专门代谢系统在很大程度上仍未得到研究。在过去十年中，随着基因组学资源的爆炸式增长和工具箱的快速扩展，对非模型物种中植物特殊代谢的探索变得比以往任何时候都更加可行。我们回顾了促成这一快速进步的最先进的工具。我们展示了采用各种创新方法的从头生物合成途径发现的最新例子。我们还提请注意亚细胞、细胞、组织、器官间和种间水平的植物专门代谢的高阶组织，这将对未来综合代谢工程策略的设计具有重要意义。《植物生物学年度评论》第 71 卷的预计最终在线出版日期为 2020 年 4 月 29 日。请参阅 http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates 了解修订后的估计值。