Genomic Signatures of Specialized Metabolism in Plants

Specialized Evolution Many plants make chemical compounds that are potentially of use to humans, but their evolutionary histories are unknown. Chae et al. (p. 510 ) examined how algae and land plants have been able to evolve secondary metabolism biochemistry—those compounds produced in response to their environment—in the face of purifying evolutionary pressure to maintain primary and necessary metabolic pathways. Genomic data was used to separate the primary from the secondary metabolism pathway genes and to construct the evolutionary trajectories of secondary metabolism. Secondary metabolic pathways tend to be controlled by clustered, co-regulated sets of newly duplicated and maintained genes.