A tale of sugars’ tails – diverse acyl chains decorate sugars in Solanum species’ trichomes

Collectively, plants synthesize hundreds of thousands of small organic compounds.Only a minority of them belong to primary metabolism, defined by being essential and common to all plants.The vast majority are specialized metabolites, which are structurally diverse, usually limited to certain taxonomic groups and produced in specific tissues and under specific conditions.These specialized metabolites contribute to plant adaptation by playing a myriad of roles throughout a plant's life, from recruiting pollinators by conferring a flower scent (Huang and Dudareva, 2023), to the modulation of root microbiota by secreting a specific combination of metabolites (Huang et al., 2019).One of the most relevant functions of specialized metabolism is plant defense -this chemical defense includes direct interactions, such as the suppression of oviposition, and indirect interactions, such as the attraction of natural enemies of attacking herbivores (Huang and Dudareva, 2023).