bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.04.977231; this version posted March 5, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. 1 Evolution of a plant gene cluster in Solanaceae and emergence of metabolic diversity 2 Pengxiang Fan1, Peipei Wang2, Yann-Ru Lou1, Bryan J. Leong2, Bethany M. Moore2, Craig A. Schenck1, Rachel 3 Combs3†, Pengfei Cao2,4, Federica Brandizzi2,4, Shin-Han Shiu2,5, Robert L. Last1,2* 4 1Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 5 2Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 6 3Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211 7 4MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States, East Lansing, MI 8 48824 9 5Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 10 48824 11 †Current address: Center for Applied Plant Sciences, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210 12 *Corresponding Author:
[email protected] 13 Short title: Plant Metabolic Evolution 14 Abstract (<150 words) 15 Plants produce phylogenetically and spatially restricted, as well as structurally diverse specialized 16 metabolites via multistep metabolic pathways. Hallmarks of specialized metabolic evolution 17 include enzymatic promiscuity, recruitment of primary metabolic enzymes and genomic 18 clustering of pathway genes. Solanaceae plant glandular trichomes produce defensive acylsugars, 19 with aliphatic sidechains that vary in length across the family. We describe a tomato gene cluster 20 on chromosome 7 involved in medium chain acylsugar accumulation due to trichome specific 21 acyl-CoA synthetase and enoyl-CoA hydratase genes.