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Improvement of glucosinolates by metabolic engineering in Brassica crops

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Abstract

Glucosinolates (GSLs) are a class of sulfur- and nitrogen-containing, and amino acid-derived important secondary metabolites, which mainly present in plants of Brassicaceae family, including Brassica crops, such as broccoli, cabbage, and oilseed rape. The bioactive GSL metabolites confer benefits to plant defense, human health, and the unique flavor of some Brassica crops. However, certain GSL profiles have adverse effects and are known as anti-nutritional factors. This has attracted mounting attempts to increase beneficial GSLs and reduce detrimental ones in the most commonly consumed Brassica crops. We provide a comprehensive overview of metabolic engineering applied in Brassica crops to achieve this purpose, including modulation of GSL biosynthesis, ablation of GSL hydrolysis, inhibition of GSL transport processes, and redirection of metabolic flux to GSL. Moreover, advances in omics approaches, i.e., genomics, transcriptome, and metabolome, applied in the elucidation of GSL metabolism in Brassica crops, as well as promising and potential genome-editing technologies are also discussed.

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Funding

Zhejiang Provincial Ten-thousand Program for Leading Talents of Science and Technology Innovation (2018R52026); National Natural Science Foundation of China [Nos. 31800252, 32072586 and 31500247]; Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province [No. LY21C020002].

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Contributions

HM: writing of original draft, drawing of figures. WZ: drawing of figures and tables. JW: review and editing. FZ: drawing of figures and tables. BS: writing of original draft, review and editing. QW: review and editing, supervision, funding acquisition.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Bo Sun or Qiaomei Wang.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Huiying Miao and Wei Zeng contributed equally

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Miao, H., Zeng, W., Wang, J. et al. Improvement of glucosinolates by metabolic engineering in Brassica crops. aBIOTECH 2, 314–329 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42994-021-00057-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42994-021-00057-y

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