Biotechnological Approaches to Enhance Plant Secondary Metabolites: Recent Trends and Future Prospects

It highlights the synthesis, classification, biological function, medicinal applications, and an overview of the recent advancements for the enhanced production of novel secondary metabolites in plants.

It overviewed the role of induced mutation, salinity stress, Brassinosteroids impact to increase the secondary metabolic contents in plants and suggests increase in enzymatic activity in plants could be due to various point mutations which in turn could play a role at transcriptome levels.

It discussed the significant role of endophytes to enhance the contents of plant secondary metabolites.

Alternatively, it also suggests urgent need to set up the standard operating procedures using hydroponics system of cultivation for significant enhancement of secondary metabolite contents.

It enlists various in vitro techniques to enhance plant secondary metabolites contents using plant tissue culture approaches.

It systematically overviewed the state of art in biotechnological tools viz. CRISPER Cas9, and RNAi to enhance the plant secondary metabolite contents and recommend CRISPER Cas9 technology over the RNAi, ZFNs and TALENs because of its relatively simple and high precision method with easily programmable tool by changing the guide sequence of the sgRNA to any DNA sequence of interest with its capacity to recognize multiple targeted genes with very low off-target effects due to reduced CpG methylation.