Fig. 1. Approaches for plant biosynthetic pathway discovery. Physical co-clustering, co-expression, evolutionary co-occurrence, and epigenetic co-regulation can all be used to identify candidate biosynthetic pathways. Using, for example, network analysis, these approaches can also be combined, if sufficient data is available. Functionally cohesive modules can then be extracted from such a network and annotated for the presence of genes encoding biosynthesis-related protein families. Finally, modules that have a strong biosynthetic signature can be correlated to metabolite counts or molecular families derived from molecular networking82,83 of metabolite data.
