Metabolic engineering to enhance the value of plants as green factories

Abstract

The promise of plants to serve as the green factories of the future is ever increasing. Plants have been used traditionally for construction, energy, food and feed. Bioactive compounds primarily derived from specialized plant metabolism continue to serve as important scaffold molecules for pharmaceutical drug production. Yet, the past few years have witnessed a growing interest on plants as the ultimate harvesters of carbon and energy from the sun, providing carbohydrate and lipid biofuels that would contribute to balancing atmospheric carbon. How can the metabolic output from plants be increased even further, and what are the bottlenecks? Here, we present what we perceive to be the main opportunities and challenges associated with increasing the efficiency of plants as chemical factories. We offer some perspectives on when it makes sense to use plants as production systems because the amount of biomass needed makes any other system unfeasible. However, there are other instances in which plants serve as great sources of biological catalysts, yet are not necessarily the best-suited systems for production. We also present emerging opportunities for manipulating plant genomes to make plant synthetic biology a reality.

Melatonin production in Escherichia coli by dual expression of serotonin N-acetyltransferase and caffeic acid O-methyltransferase

“…However, progress to date has been hindered by an inadequate information base on the mechanism by which melatonin is regulated in plants (Byeon et al 2015b) and the lack of a functional ASMT expression in E. coli (BenAbdallah et al 2011). Although overproduction of bioactive compounds in plants has many advantages (Yuan and Grotewold 2015), melatonin overproduction in angiosperms is considerably more complex than in other heterologous systems, such as E. coli (Chen et al 2015;Kim et al 2015).…”

Identification and expression analyses of MYB and WRKY transcription factor genes in Papaver somniferum L

“…Promoter structure Studies of co-regulate genes, and identification and isolation of common regulatory TFs are efficient strategies for breeding quantitative traits such as production of secondary (Table 5). The graph is built using the Microsoft Power Point software metabolites by engineering specific TFs, which is sometimes more effective than complicated enzymatic steps (Gantet and Memelink 2002;Yuan and Grotewold 2015).…”

Strategies for the production of biochemicals in bioenergy crops

“…For example, bioenergy crops can be genetically improved for producing more biomass, being more resilient to stresses like pathogens and drought conditions, or synthesizing cell wall materials with reduced recalcitrance towards deconstruction processes [4,5]. In addition, metabolic engineering offers the possibility to increase the value of biomass by overproducing in planta a wide range of products [6,7]. These valuable chemicals can be naturally produced by certain plants, but are often present in too low quantities in dedicated bioenergy crop for their exploitation.…”