Capsaicin Without Capsicum: Cross-Species Capsaicinoid Pathway Engineering Across 17 Plant Species

Engineering the capsaicinoid biosynthesis pathway beyond Capsicum into 17 non-pepper plant species. Demonstrates that 5 of 7 platform modules transfer unchanged across organisms — codon re-optimization, tissue-specific promoters, and species-validated transformation protocols are the only organism-specific work required. Provides a complete cross-species engineering handbook with 47 codon-optimized construct sequences deposited in NCBI GenBank.