Decoding the chemical language of plants

Seminar by Dr. Tomas Pluskal

Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry

Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

Biochemistry of Plant Specialized Metabolites

https://pluskal.group.uochb.cz/en

Where: L4F01

When: May 18, 2023, 10:30-11:30

Abstract

Although plants are an incredibly rich source of pharmaceutically relevant specialized metabolites, biosynthetic pathway elucidation in plants has proven challenging. Unlike bacteria and many fungal species that contain biosynthetic operons, the genes of plant biosynthetic pathways typically scatter randomly across their genomes, making pathway discovery via genome mining nearly impossible. My lab is developing generalized workflows for connecting biosynthetic gene sequences (RNAseq data) to their downstream metabolites (LC-MS data). For this, I will discuss a “top-down” approach based on correlating expression levels of enzymes with metabolite abundance across a large plant family, and a “bottom-up” approach based on predicting the substrate specificity and catalytic function of individual biosynthetic enzymes directly from their sequences using self-supervised deep learning.