ABSTRACT
Plant natural products evolved as key elements in adaptive responses to stress, both biotic and abiotic, in close connection with the sessile habit. During this process, an intricate relationship between dedicated metabolic pathways and structural features of plants was established, affording high efficiency in metabolic competence and generating great metabolite diversity. This metabolic array has proven a major reservoir of bioactive compounds for treating and preventing human diseases. Considering the defense-related role of natural products in plants and the signaling pathways that trigger their biosynthesis upon stress exposure, it may be advantageous to use environmental signals or their transduction elements for enriching biomass with pharmacologically interesting metabolites. Among the environmental factors that promote natural product accumulation when applied at moderate intensity are: heat, cold, drought, herbivory, pathogens, ultraviolet (UV) radiation, osmotic stress and heavy metals. This chapter reviews some recent examples on stimulation of bioactive natural product accumulation in Brazilian medicinal plants, offering an integrated view of plant-environment interaction strategies to improve target metabolite yields.
