Advances in Microbial Biosynthesis of Plant Natural Products
A special issue of Bioengineering (ISSN 2306-5354). This special issue belongs to the section "Biochemical Engineering".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2024) | Viewed by 1520
Special Issue Editors
Interests: metabolic engineering; synthetic biology; microbial cell factories; plant natural products; tolerance engineering
Interests: natural products; synthetic biology; metabolic engineering; enzymology; bioorganic chemistry
Interests: natural products; synthetic biology; microbial cell factories; bioconversion; protein engineering
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Plant drugs have been used for thousands of years to treat various diseases, and they have contributed to the development of numerous modern medicines. Plant natural products (PNPs), which include terpenoids, alkaloids, polyketides, and phenylpropanoids, are an important family of compounds with numerous attractive activities, such as antioxidation, antitumor, anti-inflammatory, and analgesic properties. PNPs are widely used in medicine, cosmetics, health products, condiments, pigments, and other high-value fields. Traditionally, PNPs are mainly extracted from wild and/or cultivated plants, but this route suffers from obvious disadvantages, such as low yield, high cost, and fluctuating supply. However, the flourishing synthetic biology in recent years provides a new route for the biosynthesis of PNPs in microbial hosts.
By elucidating the pathway and discovering the key enzymes of PNP biosynthesis, synthetic biology strategies can be employed to build microbial cell factories to produce PNPs or PNP intermediates. These cell factories can continuously and efficiently synthesize low-carbon, economic, and environmentally friendly PNPs, which will provide an alternative approach to the current route of plant extraction. The performance of PNPs microbial cell factories can be further improved by mining and/or engineering key pathway enzymes, increasing substrate import, enhancing cofactors’ supply, minimizing byproducts’ formation, alleviating metabolic burden, accelerating product export, and so on. Enzyme engineering and artificial biosynthetic route construction can also be used to create novel PNP derivatives.
The scope of this Special Issue is to address the potential and challenges to achieve efficient synthesis of various PNPs in microbial cells. This Special Issue will cover topics related to the microbial cell factory, plant natural products, bioactive compounds, synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, metabolic regulation, metabolic pathway, and microbial fermentation. These studies will help researchers and engineers to make use of various metabolic research strategies, achieving the goal of cost-effective microbial production of PNPs.
Dr. Zaigao Tan
Dr. Tao Liu
Dr. Wei Zhou
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- microbial cell factory
- plant natural products
- bioactive compounds
- synthetic biology
- metabolic engineering
- metabolic regulation
- metabolic pathway
- microbial fermentation