how would you go about testing for food consumption of plant 'a's secondary metabolism. Let's say you wanted to do some type of genetic engineering, or just possibly enhancement, of a plant producing caffiene.

many sources say alkaloid producing plants produce these alkaloids under their 'secondary' metabolism. Would you have to reproduce a cell growth mass under some type of protein feeding to 'REDUCE' the life to a more primative state? you could probably study a lot of things with these alkaloid producing plants like coffee or coca or cannabis or whatever if this was possible.

yes? no? i appreciate your response

thats a very large field of scientific work that i happen to be involved in. there is an interest in using genetic modification to get plants to produce more of certain secondary metabolites. or to even get bacteria to produce certain compounds that were made in a plant. the cancer drug taxol is a good example of this. its found in the pacific yew bark in such low concentrations that people have gone through an huge amount of work to get it to be produce in plant cell cultures. they are even trying to genetically engineer the entire biosynthetic pathway (21 or so genes!) into E. coli. no small task but thats how valuable the drug is!

one major issue is that in cell culture plants just wont make alkaloids. so you need to trick them to make them. by making them seem like they are under attack by some foreign organism for example. also many secondary metabolites are toxic to plant cells themselves and are only released if the cell is damaged. or that if you do get a culture to produce alot of the stuff it might kill itself so you need ways to remove the compound before it reaches high levels.

by the way cannabis only has a few alkaloids in the roots that have nothing to do with THC or the effects you get from smoking the plant.

that is fascinating as shit, so that taxim is it called? is very useful for cancer? that is interesting as shit, i'd like to formulate a better response, but have nothing to add at this time.

so all alkaloids are different? and MOST or ALL or SOME are dependant on secondary metabolism? interesting as shit
peace

taxol is very effective for ovarian and i believe breast cancer however its finding more uses all the time. as are its synthetic derivatives. i should also add that taxol is not an alkaloid but a diterpene.



well an alkaloid is different from any other alkaloid if it has a different chemical structure. there are thousands of alkaloids in nature. they are named and classified according to the amino acids from which they are derived from.

the term secondary metabolism is as loose term. its meant to describe pathways that are not part of "primary" metabolism. by primary metabolism people mean things like sugar metabolism and other very essential metabolic pathways. they are both loose terms their definition is just to make things simpler to talk about.