It takes a garden. How work on diverse plant species has contributed to an understanding of flavonoid metabolism.

Flavonoid biosynthesis is one of the most extensively studied areas of plant secondary metabolism. Modern-day reports date back to 1664 and Robert Boyle’s description of the effects of acids and bases on plant pigments. Today, through the study of flavonoid metabolism in diverse plant systems, a great deal is known about the genes involved in this pathway and the variety of biological functions in which flavonoids participate. What is abundantly clear from the sum of this work is that the central flavonoid pathway has been highly conserved during the course of plant evolution, but that there has been considerable divergence in the functional roles of its end products and, perhaps related to this, the mechanisms by which expression of the pathway is controlled. For this reason, the use of a variety of species in these studies has contributed much to developing a general view of flavonoid metabolism and function across the plant kingdom, in addition to providing a variety of experimental tools to facilitate the characterization of this complex system.