High Value Plant Products – From discovery to final product

Plant natural products have been utilised by human civilisation for millennia, providing vital medicines and essential dietary components. More recently bioactive compounds from plant sources have been used in cosmetics, as health supplements and are important components of feedstuffs. Despite significant investments new activities and new sustainable biosources are required to reduce or eliminate chemical refining and thus environmental impact. Against this backdrop, DISCO aims to understand plant biosynthetic pathways involved in the formation of high-value plant products and develop new tools for metabolic engineering and molecular breeding to generate new biosources of bioactive and industrial phytochemicals. DISCO is funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (FP7) with a total budget of 6.5 million euros. The DISCO coordinator, Professor Paul D. Fraser of Royal Holloway and Bedford New College (UK) has brought together a multinational and multidisciplinary alliance of experts from fifteen academic and industrial partner institutions that will translate discovery into industrial feasibility and/or commercialisation.