Synthetic biosystems for the production of high-value plant metabolites.
Plants display an immense diversity of specialized metabolites, many of which have been important to humanity as medicines, flavors, fragrances, pigments, insecticides and other fine chemicals. Apparently, much of the variation in plant specialized metabolism evolved through events of gene duplications followed by neo- or sub-functionalization. Most of the catalytic diversity of plant enzymes is unexplored since previous biochemical and genomics efforts have focused on a relatively small number of species. Interdisciplinary research in plant genomics, microbial engineering and synthetic biology provides an opportunity to accelerate the discovery of new enzymes. The massive identification, characterization and cataloguing of plant enzymes coupled with their deployment in metabolically optimized microbes provide a high-throughput functional genomics tool and a novel strain engineering pipeline.
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive N.W., Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada. pfacchin@ucalgary.ca
Peter J
PJ
Facchini
Joerg
J
Bohlmann
Patrick S
PS
Covello
Vincenzo
V
De Luca
Radhakrishnan
R
Mahadevan
Jonathan E
JE
Page
Dae-Kyun
DK
Ro
Christoph W
CW
Sensen
Reginald
R
Storms
Vincent J J
VJ
Martin
D001709:Biotechnology / Q000379:methods*; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods; D057166:High-Throughput Screening Assays / Q000379:methods; D010944:Plants / Q000201:enzymology / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*; D058615:Synthetic Biology / Q000379:methods