Wild tobacco genomes reveal the evolution of nicotine biosynthesis

Authors: Shuqing Xu, Thomas Brockmöller, Aura Navarro‐Quezada, Heiner Kuhl, Klaus Gase, Zhihao Ling, Wenwu Zhou, Christoph Kreitzer, Mario Stanke, Haibao Tang, Eric Lyons, Priyanka Pandey, Shree P. Pandey, Bernd Timmermann, Emmanuel Gaquerel, Ian T. Baldwin - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS 2017 cited by 216

Significance Plants produce structurally diverse specialized metabolites, many of which have been exploited in medicine or as pest control agents, whereas some have been incorporated in our daily lives, such as nicotine. In nature, these metabolites serve complex functions for plants’ ecological adaptations to biotic and abiotic stresses. By analyzing two high-quality wild tobacco genomes, we provide an in-depth genomic study that directly associates genome evolution with the assembly and evolution of the nicotine biosynthetic machinery. These results demonstrate the importance of the interplay of gene duplications and transposable element insertions in the evolution of specialized metabolism biosynthetic pathways and illuminate how complex adaptive traits could evolve.