Pairing omics to decode the diversity of plant specialized metabolism

Plants have evolved complex bouquets of specialized natural products that are utilized in medicine, agriculture, and industry. Untargeted natural product discovery has benefitted from growing plant omics data resources. Yet, plant genome complexity limits the identification and curation of biosynthetic pathways via single omics. Pairing multi-omics types within experiments provides multiple layers of evidence for biosynthetic pathway mining. The extraction of paired biological information facilitates connecting genes to transcripts and metabolites, especially when captured across time points, conditions and chemotypes. Experimental design requires specific adaptations to enable effective paired-omics analysis. Ultimately, metadata standards are required to support the integration of paired and unpaired public datasets and to accelerate collaborative efforts for natural product discovery in the plant research community.