Plant metabolic engineering in the synthetic biology era: plant chassis selection

Plant biology in the genome era.

Plant Metabolic Engineering

The advent of recombinant DNA technologies over the past 20–30 yr has resulted in an impressive emergence of metabolic engineering as a powerful complement to classical chemical synthesis for the production of specialized pharmaceuticals and industrial compounds. The simplicity and low cost of growing plants makes them ideal systems for metabolic engineering. Here, we intend to provide a perspe...

Plant metabolic engineering.

Metabolic engineering is generally defined as the redirection of one or more enzymatic reactions to produce new compounds in an organism, improve the production of existing compounds, or mediate the degradation of compounds. In highlighting progress in plant metabolic engineering over the past 25 years, it is first important to stress that it is in fact quite a young science in plants. Our know...

Progress in plant metabolic engineering.

P lants have been estimated to collectively synthesize more than 30,000 different terpenoids, of which many have useful applications in the manufacture of foods, industrial compounds, and pharmaceuticals. Terpenoids are synthesized from the condensation, in a head to tail fashion, of 5-carbon isoprene (or hemiterpene) units. Major terpenoid classes include mono-, sesqui-, and diterpenes, which ...

Metabolic engineering of plant volatiles.

Metabolic engineering of the volatile spectrum offers enormous potential for plant improvement because of the great contribution of volatile secondary metabolites to reproduction, defense and food quality. Recent advances in the identification of the genes and enzymes responsible for the biosynthesis of volatile compounds have made this metabolic engineering highly feasible. Notable successes h...