Abstract
Medicinal plants produce a wealth of pharmaceutical compounds such as digitoxin and vincristine. Unfortunately, the specialized biochemical pathways leading to such compounds remain poorly understood and progress in elucidating and manipulating these taxonomically-restricted metabolic pathways has been correspondingly slow. Development of "omics"-level resources for medicinal plants has been limited, which means that research in these species has not benefited to the same extent as has research in model plants and agronomic crop species. With the combined use of state-of-the-art sequencing technologies, metabolomics capabilities, and bioinformatics, we are developing an unrestricted, public resource to address this growing gap in our knowledge base of species-specific plant metabolism. This resource is designed to accelerate the identification and functional analysis of genes involved in natural product biosynthesis. Progress towards the discovery of the pathways and genes responsible for biosynthesis of key pharmaceuticals and their diversification will be discussed.
