Description:
Plant secondary metabolites are an important source of therapeutic drugs or drug leads. The advent of genomic and metabolomic technologies now opens possibilities to bring the field of plant natural product research into the 21st century and to replace serendipitous and haphazard findings by rational design and discovery.
Research objectives:
Plants contain a wide diversity of so-called secondary metabolites that are known as pharmaceutical active substances, used as a source for pharmaceutical products. Sesquiterpene lactones, such as parthenolide from Tanacetum parthenium, and phenolic diterpenes, such as carnosic acid from Rosmarinus officinalis, are examples of groups of substances with pharmaceutical activity, through the presence of special functional groups. The current developments in high-throughput omics techniques enable the screening of functional groups in plant metabolites and of genotypes/tissues and growing conditions with optimal levels of bioactive substances, and the identification and cloning of genes involved in their biosynthesis. With this knowledge and genes, optimal pharmaceutical products can be created by heterologous expression in plants or microorganisms.
Approach
The following activities will be carried out by PRI-BS as part of this project:
- The set up of extraction and detection techniques of target components (2009)
- The set up of differential metabolomics techniques (2009)
- Screening of different propagating material on target components and their biosynthetic precursors using various metabolomics techniques (2009 and onwards)
- The set-up of gene and metabolite databases (2009 and onwards)
- Differential metabolomics of transgenic plants (various expression platforms)
- Gene function analysis for metabolomics
Results and products:
The output of this project will be scientific publications, analysis protocols, isolated genes, sequences database, metabolite database, purified bioactive plant substances |
