Physiological Regulation of Plants for Enhanced Bioactivity

Abstract

Plant secondary metabolites, such as terpenoids, phenolics and alkaloids, play a significant role in plant defence and have a wide range of pharmacological and industrial applications. However, the utility of their use is limited by the complex environmental and physiological dependencies which lead to different and low yields. This systematic review offers a thorough review of strategies used to manipulate plant physiology with the ultimate effort of reducing the fundamental yield-quality paradox and improving the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites. The review first outlines how a plant's innate stress response is creatively tapped. Physiological elicitors, such as natural stressors (water deficit, light quality and temperature extremes), act as natural stressors, causing oxidative stress, and diverting carbon flux towards defense pathways. On this, specific abiotic and biotic elicitors (e.g., Jasmonates, Chitosan) and fine tuning of the nutrition modulation are studied and their efficacy in achieving hyper-accumulation of controlled secondary metabolites is examined. Two important transitions are underscored: an approach to genome editing for proactive metabolic pathway manipulation using CRISPR/Cas9, and the incorporation of multi-omics data to understand the complex regulatory networks. Though there are some issues of economic scalability and complicated ethical / regulatory issues to overcome, the future of the field is a closed loop system that combines these cutting edge technologies. This will likely lead to the development of predictive models for designing biofortified crops, global health advances and establishing the future supply of high-value compounds.