Trichomes could be found on the surfaces of leaves, stems and other organs of many angiosperm plants. The plant trichomes were commonly divided into two classes: non-glandular trichomes (not many chemicals could be found inside) and glandular trichomes which produce large amount of specialized natural products of diverse classes. Thus plant glandular trichomes are considered as chemical factories due to their metabolic capacity with high efficiency. This property makes glandular trichomes excellent experimental system for elucidation of the pathways of these chemicals at enzymatic or regulatory level. The fast development of various -omics techniques has greatly accelerated this procedure. The purpose of this review is to provide a brief introduction about the methods and technologies used for the investigation on glandular trichomes, summarize the current progress and highlight the potential applications of glandular trichome studies into metabolic engineering using the strategy of synthetic biology.
