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Natural products derived from the secondary metabolism of plants have played an essentially important role in the treatment of diseases and illnesses throughout the life history of humans. The search for relief and cure of diseases through the ingestion of herbs and leaves may have been one of the earliest ways in which natural products were used (Cragg and Newman, 2013; Katz and Baltz, 2016). The diversity of molecular structures and nature’s ability to provide molecules of structural complexity hardly imagined or elaborated by synthesis is the result of many different biosynthetic pathways that are involved in the production of a plant’s secondary metabolites, and what also leads these metabolites to exhibit a wide range of biological activities (Harvey et al., 2015; Bernardini et al., 2018). The production of specialized metabolites by plants is characterized by the specificity of the plant species and is regarded an essentially relevant adaptive response in terms of coping with environmental and/or external stimuli to which the plants are exposed (Ghorbanpour and Varma, 2017). In addition, these metabolites play a key role in regulating plants growth, development, and defense, as well as in mediating plantenvironment interactions, including protection against several stressful and challenging environmental change conditions (Rai et al., 2017; Isah, 2019; Pandey and Senthil-Kumar, 2019; Erb and Kliebenstein, 2020).

In recent decades, there has been an increasingly growing scientific interest in gaining a comprehensive understanding regarding the changes in secondary metabolism in plants, and a considerable number of studies have been …