Specialized metabolites and valuable molecules in crop and medicinal plants: The evolution of their use and strategies for their production

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

  • Vincenzo D’Amelia
  • Teresa Docimo
  • Christoph Crocoll
  • Maria Manuela Rigano

Plants naturally produce a terrific diversity of molecules, which we exploit for promoting our overall well-being. Plants are also green factories. Indeed, they may be exploited to biosynthesize bioactive molecules, proteins, carbohydrates and biopolymers for sustainable and large-scale production. These molecules are easily converted into commodities such as pharmaceuticals, antioxidants, food, feed and biofuels for multiple industrial processes. Novel plant biotechnological, genetics and metabolic insights ensure and increase the applicability of plant-derived compounds in several industrial sectors. In particular, synergy between disciplines, including apparently distant ones such as plant physiology, pharmacology, ‘omics sciences, bioinformatics and nanotechnology paves the path to novel applications of the so-called molecular farming. We present an overview of the novel studies recently published regarding these issues in the hope to have brought out all the interesting aspects of these published studies.

Original languageEnglish
Article number936
JournalGenes
Volume12
Issue number6
Number of pages20
ISSN2073-4425
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

    Research areas

  • Bioactive compounds, Biofortification, Genome editing, Genomics, Medicinal plants, Metabolomics, Plant biotechnology, Plant natural products

ID: 273580301