Biological elicitors of plant secondary metabolites: mode of action and use in the production of nutraceutics.

Many secondary metabolites of interest for human health and nutrition are produced by plants when they are under attack of microbial pathogens or insects. Treatment with elicitors derived from phytopathogens can be an effective strategy to increase the yield of specific metabolites obtained from plant cell cultures. Understanding how plant cells perceive microbial elicitors and how this perception leads to the accumulation of secondary metabolites, may help us improve the production of nutraceutics in terms of quantity and of quality of the compounds. The knowledge gathered in the past decades on elicitor perception and transduction is now being combined to high-throughput methodologies, such as transcriptomics and metabolomics, to engineer plant cells that produce compounds of interest at industrial scale.