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Environmental factors enhance production of plant secondary metabolites toward more tolerance and human health: Cocoa and coffee two model species

Abstract:

Plants genetically are able to produce secondary metabolites (SM). The aim of SM production varies depending on environmental cues based on plant genetic pool that help them live and survive. They are multifunctional molecules like regulators, detoxifiers, transporters, chaperons, proteases, etc. SMs make plants medicinal and give them pharmaceutical properties. As all plants generate SMs, they all are considered medicinal. Environmental cues and stresses stimulate plants which subsequently adjust their SM content that genetically produce in order to tolerate adverse conditions. Stress tolerance is under more consideration in plant breeding due to climate change effects on plant production. Hence, stresses are tools that can improve plant tolerance to harmful situations resulting in to a better quantity and quality of SM that benefit plants as producers and human/animals as consumers. Plants studied under stress and wild plants are good models for plant breeding programs as they show how plants tolerate stresses, which metabolites are produced more/less in response to stress and which condition can affect plants to positively produce SMs. Cacao and coffee are two plant models having known SMs with pharmaceutical/medicinal/nutritional values that make them tolerant to adverse conditions and positively produced upon plant exposure to stress.