Engineering complex metabolic pathways in plants

Abstract

Metabolic engineering can be used to modulate endogenous metabolic pathways in plants or introduce new metabolic capabilities in order to increase the production of a desirable compound or reduce the accumulation of an undesirable one. In practice, there are several major challenges that need to be overcome, such as gaining enough knowledge about the endogenous pathways to understand the best intervention points, identifying and sourcing the most suitable metabolic genes, expressing those genes in such a way as to produce a functional enzyme in a heterologous background, and, finally, achieving the accumulation of target compounds without harming the host plant. This article discusses the strategies that have been developed to engineer complex metabolic pathways in plants, focusing on recent technological developments that allow the most significant bottlenecks to be overcome.

Research at the Universitat de Lleida is supported by MICINN, Spain (BIO2011-23324, BIO02011-22525, BIO2012-35359, and PIM2010PKB-00746); European Union Framework 7 Program–SmartCell Integrated Project 222716; European Union Framework 7 European Research Council IDEAS Advanced Grant Program-BIOFORCE (to P.C.); RecerCaixa; COST Action FA0804 (Molecular Farming: Plants as a Production Platform for High Value Proteins); and Centre CONSOLIDER on Agrigenomics, funded by MICINN, Spain. Research at Ghent University is supported by Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds (BOF2004/GOA/012 and BOF2009/GOA/004 to D.V.D.S.) and the Research Foundation Flanders (3G012609 to D.V.D.S.). D.B. is indebted to the Research Foundation Flanders for a PhD fellowship.