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Abstract
Flavonoid-derived plant natural products have long been known to function as floral
pigments for the attraction of insect pollinators, as signal molecules for beneficial
microorganisms in the rhizosphere, and as antimicrobial defense compounds. New functions
for flavonoid compounds continue to be found, particularly in plant-microorganism
signaling, and there has been an explosion of interest in flavonoids and isoflavonoids
as health-promoting components of the human diet. The flavonoid and isoflavonoid pathways
are probably the best characterized natural product pathway in plants, and are therefore
excellent targets for metabolic engineering. Manipulation of flavonoid biosynthesis
can be approached via several strategies, including sense or antisense manipulation
of pathway genes, modification of the expression of regulatory genes, or generation
of novel enzymatic specificities by ra-tional approaches based on emerging protein
structure data. In addition, activation tagging provides a novel approach for the
discovery of uncharacterized structural and regulatory genes of flavonoid biosynthesis.