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Plant specialized metabolism
Open accessAbstract
Environmental factors such as light, water, minerals, temperature, and other organisms affect plant growth and development. Unlike animals, plants can't escape from unfavorable biotic and abiotic stresses. Thus, they evolved the ability to biosynthesize specific chemicals referred to as plant specialized metabolites in order to facilitate successful interactions with the surrounding environment, as well as with other organisms including plants, insects, microorganisms, and animals. While the exact number of plant specialized metabolites, historically called secondary metabolites, is currently unknown, it has been estimated to range from 200,000 to 1,000,000 compounds. In contrast to the species-, organ- and tissue-specific nature of plant specialized metabolites, primary metabolites are shared by all living organisms, are vital for growth, development and reproduction, and comprise only about 8,000 compounds. The biosynthesis and storage of plant specialized metabolites are developmentally and temporally regulated and depend on biotic and abiotic factors. Specific cell types, subcellular organelles, microcompartments, and/or anatomical structures are often devoted to producing and storing these compounds. The functions of many specialized metabolites are still not fully understood but are generally considered to be essential for the fitness and survival of plants, partially by interacting with other organisms in both mutualistic (for example, attraction of pollinators) and antagonistic (such as defense against herbivores and pathogens) ways. In this primer, we will focus on specialized-metabolite functions in plant defense interactions and on the genetic, molecular, and biochemical mechanisms leading to the structural diversity of specialized metabolites. Though less understood, we will also touch on the mode of action of specialized metabolites in plant defense.
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“Despite enormous diversity, all plant specialized metabolites are biosynthesized from chemically simple precursors derived from primary metabolism.”
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“Unlike mechanical defense, chemical defense relies predominantly on specialized metabolites that can protect plants via direct or indirect interactions (Figure 1).”
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“Root exudates, which are a complex mixture of various specialized metabolites, can directly repel, inhibit, or intoxicate pathogenic microorganisms in the rhizosphere.”
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“To date, there is no clear distinction between these two mechanisms because specialized morphological structures like trichomes, secretory ducts, and laticifers not only serve as physical barriers or traps, but also contain specialized metabolites that possess anti-herbivore and anti-pathogen activities that enhance mechanical defense.”
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“In addition to contributing to direct and indirect defenses, herbivoreinduced volatiles act as airborne signals that warn distal plant parts and neighboring plants about the herbivory and prime them to respond more strongly to upcoming insect attacks (Figure 2).”
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In the paper
§ Plant specialized metabolism
“By defi nition, plant specialized metabolites are species-specifi c compounds that contribute to plant adaptation and to the successful survival of plants in the changing ecological environment.”
§ Defensive function of plant specialized metabolites: direct interactions
“While some specialized metabolites evolved early in plant evolution and are therefore found in multiple plant families, others appeared more recently and thus are restricted to a few taxa.”
Citations
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Iwakami, S., & Yamaguchi, T. (2026) · Pest Management Science · doi:10.1002/ps.71279
Karakuş, Z., & Sarıkürkçü, C. (2026) · Pharmaceuticals · doi:10.3390/ph19091429 · Cited by 2
“The distribution of specialized metabolites within a plant is not uniform; their biosynthesis and accumulation are often organ-and tissue-specific and are regulated by developmental, biotic and abiotic environmental factors [1,4,5].”
Choi, M., Forrister, D. L., Dury, G. J., Kang, K. B., Sedio, B. E., & Joo, Y. (2026) · New Phytologist · doi:10.1111/nph.71589 · Cited by 1
Advances in plant metabolic engineering through synthetic biology
Alsuwat, H., Alvarez, D., & Al‐Babili, S. (2026) · Frontiers in Plant Science · doi:10.3389/fpls.2026.1957203
Metadata
- Authors
- Huang, X.-Q., & Dudareva, N.
- Affiliations
- Purdue University West Lafayette (US)
- Corresponding author
- Dudareva, Natalia
- ORCID
- Dudareva, Natalia
- Venue
- Current Biology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2023-06
- Volume
- 33
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- R473-R478
- ISSN
- 0960-9822 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4379389745
- Cited by
- 92
- References
- 12
- Citations by year
- 2026: 36 · 2025: 26 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 4
- FWCI
- 7.03
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
- www.elsevier.com/legal/tdmrep-license (tdm)
- www.elsevier.com/open-access/userlicense/1.0/ (vor, 370 d)
- doi.org/10.15223/policy-017 (stm-asf)
- doi.org/10.15223/policy-037 (stm-asf)
- doi.org/10.15223/policy-012 (stm-asf)
- doi.org/10.15223/policy-029 (stm-asf)
- doi.org/10.15223/policy-004 (stm-asf)
- Locations
- Current Biology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- USDA NIFA
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Plant biochemistry and biosynthesis
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Insect Science › Insect-Plant Interactions and Control
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Plant Gene Expression Analysis
- Keywords
- plant secondary metabolism, secondary metabolites, plant defense, plant-microbe interactions, plant defense against herbivores, pathogen defense, biosynthesis, metabolic regulation, structural diversity, mechanism of action, primary metabolites, plant-environment interactions
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Plants, Plant Development
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-09-28, under version 3 of the claim definition (prompt extract-v3).
A second model labelled each claim on 2026-09-28 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
