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Secondary Metabolites in Plants: General Introduction

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Part of the book series: Learning Materials in Biosciences ((LMB))

Abstract

Plants usually contain many different secondary metabolites, but some species contain very specific subsets of secondary metabolites. The amount of the compounds and the kind of compounds vary between different cells, tissues and developmental stages and can be influenced by external stressors. This means that the enzymatic pathways have to be tightly controlled. To synthetize secondary metabolites, plants use products from the primary metabolism as building blocks. The metabolites are further fused and modified by different processes to lead to the variations observed in nature.

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Correspondence to Angelika Böttger .

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Böttger, A., Vothknecht, U., Bolle, C., Wolf, A. (2018). Secondary Metabolites in Plants: General Introduction. In: Lessons on Caffeine, Cannabis & Co. Learning Materials in Biosciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99546-5_9

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