Production of plant bioactive compounds in microbial systems via metabolic engineering and synthetic biology

Plant natural compounds especially secondary metabolites play a key role in human life due to their applications as an additive, flavor, fragrance, pigment, pesticide and medicine. However, these compounds are produced in low quantity in native plants. With the progress in genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics and genome editing tools, elucidation of the biosynthetic pathways genes of related compounds have been accelerated to pave the way towards re-engineering these compounds in new production platforms for commercialization. Metabolic engineering/Synthetic biology is an efficient method to produce natural compounds in a sustainable way at larger scale. As most of plant natural compounds are not biosynthesized by microorganisms, synthetic biology has been used to develop the engineered microorganisms such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Escherichia coli for heterologous production of plant natural compounds. In the present work I will show how to elucidate the biosynthetic pathway of natural compounds by functional characterization of the biosynthetic genes, select the proper microbial platform host and use new cutting-edge tools such as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), CASTs (CRISPR-associated transposons) to integrate the plant biosynthetic genes in microbial platforms. In addition, opportunities and challenges for large scale production and commercialization will be discussed.

کلیدواژه ها:

Synthetic biology ، Secondary metabolites ، Biosynthetic pathway ، CRISPR