Engineering complex metabolic pathways in plants

Farré Martinez, Gemma; Capell Capell, Teresa; Zhu, Changfu; Christou, Paul; Blancquaert, Dieter; Van Der Straeten, Dominique

doi:https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-arplant-050213-035825

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Issue date

2014

Author

Farré Martinez, Gemma

Capell Capell, Teresa

Zhu, Changfu

Christou, Paul

Blancquaert, Dieter

Van Der Straeten, Dominique

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.

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10459.1/58515

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-arplant-050213-035825

Is part of

Annual Review of Plant Biology, 2014, vol. 65, p. 187-223