Abstract
Plant metabolic engineering is quite a young science in plants, however, in the past decade it has generated a lot of interest. The reason being that plant secondary metabolites are economically very important as they find applications in pharmaceuticals, insecticides, flavours, fragrances and dyes but their production in plants are in very low quantities. With the development of basic molecular biology and genetic engineering techniques a lot of strategies and tools have become available for targeted improvement of quality and quantity of secondary metabolites. Plant alkaloids constitute the second largest group of secondary metabolites and provide many pharmacologically active compounds. The knowledge of secondary metabolite pathways is however very limited and is the major constraint for successful application of metabolic engineering. Polyamines are low molecular weight polycationic molecules, ubiquitous in nature and are known to play an important role in the regulation of plant growth and development. They also act as precursors of many of the economically important secondary metabolites. Polyamine biosynthetic pathway provides an attractive model for such studies as the various steps in the pathway are very well worked out and most of the genes involved in the pathway have been cloned. Further, polyamine biosynthesis has also been engineered for enhanced alkaloid content by over-expression of ornithine decarboxylase and arginine decarboxylase genes. The present review highlights the prospects of engineering of polyamine biosynthesis for enhanced alkaloid content and also provides a forward looking perspective of this exciting field over the coming years
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Bhattacharya, E., Rajam, M.V. (2007). Polyamine Biosynthetic Pathway: A Potential Target for Enhancing Alkaloid Production. In: Verpoorte, R., Alfermann, A., Johnson, T. (eds) Applications of Plant Metabolic Engineering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6031-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6031-1_5
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