Relevance and regulation of alternative splicing in plant secondary metabolism: current understanding and future directions

Abstract

The secondary metabolism of plants is an essential life process enabling organisms to navigate various stages of plant development and cope with ever-changing environmental stresses. Secondary metabolites, abundantly found in nature, possess significant medicinal value. Among the regulatory mechanisms governing these metabolic processes, alternative splicing stands out as a widely observed post-transcriptional mechanism present in multicellular organisms. It facilitates the generation of multiple mRNA transcripts from a single gene by selecting different splicing sites. Selective splicing events in plants are widely induced by various signals, including external environmental stress and hormone signals. These events ultimately regulate the secondary metabolic processes and the accumulation of essential secondary metabolites in plants by influencing the synthesis of primary metabolites, hormone metabolism, biomass accumulation, and capillary density. Simultaneously, alternative splicing plays a crucial role in enhancing protein diversity and the abundance of the transcriptome. This paper provides a summary of the factors inducing alternative splicing events in plants and systematically describes the progress in regulating alternative splicing with respect to different secondary metabolites, including terpenoid, phenolic compounds, and nitrogen-containing compounds. Such elucidation offers critical foundational insights for understanding the role of alternative splicing in regulating plant metabolism and presents novel avenues and perspectives for bioengineering.

Acknowledgements

This work was sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32070332, 32170402, U23A20512), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFC3504800, 2022YFC3501700), the Program of Shanghai Academic/Technology Research Leader (23XD1423500), and the State Key Laboratory of Southwestern Chinese Medicine (SKLTCM202310).

Author contributions

Y.X., J.L.G., Z.Y.L., and W.S.C. conceived and designed the contents of the manuscript. Z.H.X. reviewed and edited the manuscript.

Data availability

Data availability is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest that could be perceived as prejudicing the impartiality of the research reported.

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