Yali Deng , Jie Huang , Minghui Zhao , Meifang Li

Tropical Medicinal Plant Research Center, Hainan Institute of Tropical Agricultural Resources, Sanya, 572025, Hainan, China
Author    Correspondence author
Plant Gene and Trait, 2025, Vol. 16, No. 6   
Received: 29 Sep., 2025    Accepted: 04 Nov., 2025    Published: 16 Nov., 2025

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This study mainly introduces several important metabolic pathways such as phenolic acids, flavonoids, iridoids and volatile terpenoids, discusses some key structural genes in these pathways, summarizes the key influences played by several core transcription factors in regulating these metabolic networks, and analyzes genomic, transcriptomic and metabolomic data together. It was observed that the metabolic flow varies under different tissues, developmental stages, and environmental conditions. This further explained the accumulation mode of metabolites and their relationship with pharmacological effects. The application prospects of MAS, CRISPR/Cas gene editing, and synthetic biology in the quality improvement and targeted enhancement of active components of honeysuckle were also discussed. This study aims to establish a relatively complete “metabolism-gene-trait” association framework, providing a reference for the rapid breeding of honeysuckle and more accurate pharmacological prediction in the future.

Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica); Secondary metabolism; Transcriptional regulation; Multi-omics integration; Pharmacological traits