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Henbane, Belladonna, Datura and Duboisia

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Transgenic Crops VI

Part of the book series: Biotechnology in Agriculture and Forestry ((AGRICULTURE,volume 61))

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Abstract

The tropanes have provided several important landmarks in the development of alkaloid biochemistry, and they have also played a pivotal role in successful metabolic engineering. Atropine was found early on by activity-guided fractionation (dilation of a cat’s eye). Preparation of tropinone was the first of many biomimetic syntheses that led on to thoughts of how alkaloids were produced in plants. In 1928 ornithine was suggested to be the real-life precursor of the tropane part of hyoscyamine. In the 1950s a labelled precursor (ornithine) was used for the first time to elucidate the biosynthesis of hyoscyamine. However, still today only some of the enzymes (and their respective genes) which are involved in the tropane pathway are known. The isolation of littorine and its intramolecular conversion into hyoscyamine remains a process without parallel in nature. Virus-induced gene silencing was used first to find the gene responsible for this unique rearrangement. Isolation of the h6h gene which is involved in the conversion of hyoscyamine to scopolamine started the entirely new era of metabolic engineering of secondary metabolites. This chapter describes also how functional geneomics and metabolomics can be used to discover missing genes in the pathway and to understand the regulation of the tropane alkaloids.

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  1. School of Biosciences, Plant Sciences Division, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington Campus, LE12 5RD, Loughborough, UK

    Michael R. Davey

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(2007). Henbane, Belladonna, Datura and Duboisia. In: Pua, EC., Davey, M. (eds) Transgenic Crops VI. Biotechnology in Agriculture and Forestry, vol 61. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71711-9_10

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