ABSTRACT
Plants produce a large variety of lipids that lack fatty acid moieties and are often called nonacyl lipids. The largest single category of nonacyl lipids in higher plants is undoubtedly the terpenoids, an extremely abundant class of natural products with a common biosynthetic origin. Terpenoids all share a common construction pattern: the linkage of five- carbon units having the branched carbon skeleton of isopentane. Terpenoids are found in all living organisms, but achieve their greatest structural and functional diversity in the plant kingdom. This chapter considers each of the three stages of terpenoid biosynthesis, such as, monoterpenes, sesquiterpenes, and diterpenes. It describes the sequence of biosynthetic transformations of each stage and reviews what is known about the enzymology, mechanism, and regulation of various key steps of the pathway. The chapter examines the roles of subcellular compartmentation, multienzyme complexes, assimilate partitioning, and morphological differentiation in the overall control of plant terpenoid biogenesis.
