natural-product-biosynthesis
Natural product biosynthesis is the study of the metabolic pathways and enzymatic mechanisms by which plants produce specialized compounds such as alkaloids, terpenoids, flavonoids, and phenolics. Understanding these pathways is central to plant science because these compounds mediate ecological interactions—including defense against herbivores and pathogens, pollinator attraction, and allelopathy—as well as adaptation to environmental stress. Elucidating biosynthetic routes also enables the sustainable production of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and nutraceuticals through metabolic engineering and synthetic biology approaches.
PubMed · 2026-04-08
Scientists have reviewed how a family of iron-containing enzymes found in living organisms — including plants — activate oxygen to drive chemical reactions essential for growth, defense, and the breakdown of natural compounds. These enzymes use surprisingly diverse structural tricks to do the same fundamental job.
Two major structural 'scaffolds' — the 2-His-1-carboxylate facial triad and alternative 3-His or 4-His motifs — allow nonheme iron enzymes to activate oxygen through distinct chemical pathways, greatly expanding the range of reactions they can catalyze.
Dinuclear (two-iron) enzyme families use cooperative metal-metal interactions to achieve multi-electron oxidation chemistry that single-iron enzymes cannot, enabling more complex transformations in natural product biosynthesis.
Newly characterized enzyme structures in natural product biosynthetic pathways show non-standard metal coordination and unexpected substrate selectivity, revealing that evolution has repeatedly repurposed this enzyme family for novel chemistry.