Mind the gap: the challenges and opportunities for genomics-driven harnessing of plant metabolic diversity for therapeutic applications

The Plant Kingdom is collectively capable of making a huge array of structurally diverse natural products. There are currently ∼5000 publicly available plant genome sequences. This represents only ∼0.6% of the estimated 500 000 species of higher plants on the planet. Even so, we are already overwhelmed with a mass of uncharacterised sequence data. In this review, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for decoding this growing body of information with the ultimate aim of harnessing the DNA-encoded chemical engineering capability of the Plant Kingdom to make next-generation therapeutics. We contextualise these advances with exemplars that connect genome-enabled discovery to therapeutic development, discuss current and future methodologies for the elucidation of enzyme functions using AI methodologies, and highlight the challenges which need to be overcome in order to accelerate the translation from plant sequence to medicines.