Recent discovery of new enzymes in plant natural product biosynthesis

Plants are a vast reservoir of natural products with diverse structural scaffolds, making them an invaluable source for discovering novel enzymes that catalyze unique and evolutionarily specialized metabolic transformations in biosynthetic pathways. Rapid advances in genomics, metabolomics, protein structure prediction, and heterologous pathway reconstruction have enabled the identification of numerous cryptic biosynthetic enzymes responsible for key scaffold-forming and tailoring reactions in metabolism. Particularly notable are the discoveries of plant-derived enzymes that catalyze challenging chemical transformations, including oxidative carbon-carbon bond rearrangements, atypical cycloadditions, radical-mediated coupling reactions, and iterative scaffold remodeling. This review summarizes major advances in enzyme discovery in plant natural product biosynthesis in recent years, focusing on emerging catalytic mechanisms, strategies for elucidating pathways, and evolutionary relationships, and highlights their implications for synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and the sustainable production of valuable natural products.