title: Metabolic engineering with plants for a sustainable biobased economy.
abstract: Plants are bona fide sustainable organisms because they accumulate carbon and synthesize beneficial metabolites from photosynthesis. To meet the challenges to food security and health threatened by increasing population growth and depletion of nonrenewable natural resources, recent metabolic engineering efforts have shifted from single pathways to holistic approaches with multiple genes owing to integration of omics technologies. Successful engineering of plants results in the high yield of biomass components for primary food sources and biofuel feedstocks, pharmaceuticals, and platform chemicals through synthetic biology and systems biology strategies. Further discovery of undefined biosynthesis pathways in plants, integrative analysis of discrete omics data, and diversified process developments for production of platform chemicals are essential to overcome the hurdles for sustainable production of value-added biomolecules from plants.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA. jmyoon@iastate.edu
authors.forename: Jong Moon
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Yoon
authors.forename: Le
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Jacqueline V
authors.initials: JV
authors.lastname: Shanks
mesh_terms: D018556:Crops, Agricultural / Q000235:genetics / Q000254:growth & development / Q000378:metabolism; D060847:Metabolic Engineering / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D010944:Plants / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D030821:Plants, Genetically Modified / Q000235:genetics / Q000254:growth & development / Q000378:metabolism