Emerging trends in plant natural products biosynthesis: a chemical perspective

Biosynthetic pathways are multistep processes transforming simple substrates into more complex structures. Over the past two decades, our understanding of these pathways, especially for specialized plant metabolites, has significantly increased. This surge is due to numerous scientific advancements such as next-generation sequencing, improved analytical platforms, and metabolite-transcript networks. The uprising of data sharing through public databases has also fostered collaboration and knowledge dissemination. Growing concerns about the supply of therapeutic natural products and their environmental impact have led to exploring sustainable alternatives like heterologous expression, which requires extensive knowledge of these pathways. Herein, we review emerging approaches in biosynthetic pathway elucidations and their prospects for their efficient integration.