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JXB Advance Access originally published online on December 10, 2008
Journal of Experimental Botany 2009 60(1):87-97; doi:10.1093/jxb/ern263
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© 2008 The Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper is available online free of all access charges (see http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/open_access.html for further details)

RESEARCH PAPER

Modules of co-regulated metabolites in turmeric (Curcuma longa) rhizome suggest the existence of biosynthetic modules in plant specialized metabolism

Zhengzhi Xie1,2, Xiaoqiang Ma1 and David R. Gang1,*

1Department of Plant Sciences and BIO5 Institute, 1657 E. Helen Street, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
2Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed: E-mail: gang{at}ag.arizona.edu

Turmeric is an excellent example of a plant that produces large numbers of metabolites from diverse metabolic pathways or networks. It is hypothesized that these metabolic pathways or networks contain biosynthetic modules, which lead to the formation of metabolite modules—groups of metabolites whose production is co-regulated and biosynthetically linked. To test whether such co-regulated metabolite modules do exist in this plant, metabolic profiling analysis was performed on turmeric rhizome samples that were collected from 16 different growth and development treatments, which had significant impacts on the levels of 249 volatile and non-volatile metabolites that were detected. Importantly, one of the many co-regulated metabolite modules that were indeed readily detected in this analysis contained the three major curcuminoids, whereas many other structurally related diarylheptanoids belonged to separate metabolite modules, as did groups of terpenoids. The existence of these co-regulated metabolite modules supported the hypothesis that the 3-methoxyl groups on the aromatic rings of the curcuminoids are formed before the formation of the heptanoid backbone during the biosynthesis of curcumin and also suggested the involvement of multiple polyketide synthases with different substrate selectivities in the formation of the array of diarylheptanoids detected in turmeric. Similar conclusions about terpenoid biosynthesis could also be made. Thus, discovery and analysis of metabolite modules can be a powerful predictive tool in efforts to understand metabolism in plants.

Key words: Biosynthesis, Curcuma longa, curcumin, metabolite module, metabolomics, rhizome, specialized metabolism

Received 16 June 2008; Revised 29 September 2008 Accepted 2 October 2008


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