ResearchThe Ehlting lab investigates plant secondary metabolites, also called plant natural products. Instead of motility, Plants use these bioactive compounds to cope and interact with environmental challenges. They act as UV sunscreens, as toxins to fight off pathogens, as pigments and volatiles to attract pollinators, and as feeding deterrents against herbivores, just to mention a few functions of the hundreds of thousands of secondary metabolites found in plants. Plant natural products also are important during normal plant development, the most prominent example being lignin, which provides mechanical stability to woody cells.
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We decipher how plants synthesize these compounds, what their functions are in chemical ecology and during plant development, and how the biochemical pathways evolved to generate the immense secondary metabolite diversity we see today. We increase basic knowledge on these compounds and their functions, and hopefully we can use this knowledge to increase the health of our forests through targeted tree breeding and to identify novel bioactive compounds used as dietary supplements or pharmaceuticals |
Experimentally, we use functional genomics approaches. We start with large-scale approaches, including metabolomics, transcriptomics, and comparative genomics. With this approach we identify interesting compounds and the genes encoding enzymes of those biosynthetic pathways. The candidate compounds and candidate genes/proteins responsible for their biosynthesis are further investigated to characterize their biochemical functions and to decipher their roles in the plant through reverse genetic approaches. We follow their evolutionary history to learn about the molecular evolutionary mechanisms that shaped these pathways. |