ABSTRACT
Plants need to evolve a range of survival mechanisms to adapt to ever-changing environments. The plants’ metabolome, notably the specialized secondary metabolites, are the key players profoundly involved in its defense mechanism. They mediate both direct and indirect response strategies against stress and help the plants adapt to the environment, which explains its vast diversity and association with different habitats. Among the diverse plant metabolites, alkaloids have emerged as one of the important natural products with proven efficacy across a wide range of human-related diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and neurological disorders. Therefore, exploring the biosynthetic pathway for alkaloids and understanding the underlying evolutionary mechanisms is essential to develop novel medicines and their sustainable resources for future generation. This chapter highlights the diversity of plant alkaloids and the approaches leading to the current understanding of their biosynthesis and evolution. Of particular interest to system biologists, this chapter emphasizes the different approaches used to integrate multiomic datasets with their role and immense contribution in discovering molecular components involved in the biosynthesis and regulation of plant alkaloids.
