Abstract
Plants are able to construct lineage-specific natural products from a wide array of their core metabolic pathways. Considerable progress has been made toward documenting and understanding, for example, phenylpropanoid natural products derived from phosphoenolpyruvate via the shikimate pathway, terpenoid compounds built using isopentyl pyrophosphate, and alkaloids generated by the extensive modification of amino acids. By comparison, natural products derived from fatty acids have received little attention, except for unusual fatty acids in seed oils and jasmonate-like oxylipins. However, scattered but numerous reports show that plants are able to generate many structurally diverse compounds from fatty acids, including some with highly elaborate and unique structural features that have novel bioproduct functionalities. Furthermore, although recent work has shed light on multiple new fatty acid natural product biosynthesis pathways and products in diverse plant species, these discoveries have not been reviewed. The aims of this work, therefore, are to (i) review and systematize our current knowledge of the structures and biosynthesis of fatty acid-derived natural products that are not seed oils or jasmonate-type oxylipins, specifically, polyacetylenic, very-long-chain, and aromatic fatty acid-derived natural products, and (ii) suggest priorities for future investigative steps that will bring our knowledge of fatty acid-derived natural products closer to the levels of knowledge that we have attained for other phytochemical classes.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 954-965 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Plant Journal |
| Volume | 111 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors wish to thank the Phytochemical Society of North America and The Plant Journal, who made this review possible through a Young Investigator award to LB. We also wish to thank Evan W. LaBrant for critical comments on a draft of the manuscript. EBC acknowledges U.S. Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant number 2021-67013-34009 for support of polyacetylene research and the U.S. Department of Energy Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (Award DE-SC0018420) for research on engineering of variant fatty acid metabolism.
Funding Information:
The authors wish to thank the Phytochemical Society of North America and , who made this review possible through a Young Investigator award to LB. We also wish to thank Evan W. LaBrant for critical comments on a draft of the manuscript. EBC acknowledges U.S. Department of Agriculture‐National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant number 2021‐67013‐34009 for support of polyacetylene research and the U.S. Department of Energy Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (Award DE‐SC0018420) for research on engineering of variant fatty acid metabolism. The Plant Journal
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. The Plant Journal published by Society for Experimental Biology and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Keywords
- fatty acid biosynthesis
- natural products
- polyacetylenes
- specialized metabolism