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Plants have the capacity to produce a vast array of small molecules in order to interact with and reshape their environment. These so-called secondary metabolites can have diverse biological roles, acting in protection against pathogens and abiotic stresses, uptake of nutrients, and interspecies communication, for instance. Understanding how and why specific secondary metabolites are produced is of significant interest not only from a basic biological perspective, but also because it can enable engineering of hardier plant varieties. Such understanding requires elucidation of a specific metabolite's biosynthetic pathway--the set of enzymes that carry out the chemical transformations needed to generate the metabolite from ubiquitous small molecule building blocks.