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Plants produce a wide array of natural products, many of which are likely to be useful bioactive structures. Unfortunately, these complex natural products usually occur at very low abundance and with restricted tissue distribution, thereby hindering their evaluation. Here, we report a novel approach for enhancing the accumulation of natural products based on activation tagging by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation with a T-DNA that carries cauliflower mosaic virus 35S enhancer sequences at its right border. Among ∼5000 Arabidopsis activation-tagged lines, we found a plant that exhibited intense purple pigmentation in many vegetative organs throughout development. This upregulation of pigmentation reflected a dominant mutation that resulted in massive activation of phenylpropanoid biosynthetic genes and enhanced accumulation of lignin, hydroxycinnamic acid esters, and flavonoids, including …