Chemical Biology of Plant Compound Biosynthesis: a systems biology approach to biosynthetic pathways

This research programme focuses on characterizing and reconstructing biosynthetic pathways of secondary plant metabolites. The complexity of these pathways forces us to take an integrative, systems biology approach to fine tune the pathway and reach an optimal result. We use reverse engineering of existing pathways to develop an understanding of how plants optimize expression pathways.
 
Our main topics focus on metabolite induced insect resistance in plants by studying metabolic pathways leading to the production of insecticidal terpenoid and octadecanoid derivatives. For this purpose we study the plants Tanacetum cinerariaefolium (pyrethrum) and Persicaria hydropiper for the production of pyrethrins and polygodial. We carry out deep sequencing of ESTs from the relevant tissues producing these compounds and utilize various techniques such as RNAi in the host plant, heterologous expression in microbial hosts and overexpression in Arabidopsis, maize, tomato, pepper and chrysanthemum to characterize the genes found. A variety of analytical GC-MS and LC-MS tools are available to characterize the metabolite profile and to identify novel compounds. Insect assays with thrips and whitefly are regularly carried out to establish the effects of the changed metabolite profile on the insects.

The final aim is synthetic biology: the ability to achieve controlled expression of a specific secondary metabolite in a plant host making use of systems biology tools.

» Download: Terpene biosynthetic pathways (pdf)