Research summary
Certain plants produce alkaloid special metabolites, which are substances that have medical uses. Amaryllidaceae plants, such as daffodils and snowdrops, are major producers of alkaloids. But scientists don’t fully understand the chemical reactions that allow them to do this. As Canada Research Chair in Plant Specialized Metabolism, Dr. Isabel Desgagné-Penix aims to better understand amaryllidaceae alkaloid biosynthetic pathways in order to reconstruct them in microalgae.
She and her research team are addressing key challenges in alkaloid biosynthesis and production. They are developing, integrating and exploiting multi-omics (such as genomics, metabolomics and transcriptomics) to identify the genes encoding the proteins involved in alkaloid metabolism. They will then engineer these pathways in microalgae. Ultimately, their findings will provide the genetic tools needed to produce alkaloids using microalgae or to engineer plant species that are better able to do so.