title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Departament de Producció Vegetal i Ciència Forestal, Universitat de Lleida, Agrotecnio Center, 25198 Lleida, Spain; email: christou@pvcf.udl.es.
authors.forename: Gemma
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Farré
authors.forename: Dieter
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Blancquaert
authors.forename: Teresa
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Capell
authors.forename: Dominique
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Van Der Straeten
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Christou
authors.forename: Changfu
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhu
mesh_terms: D005818:Genetic Engineering / Q000379:methods; D053858:Metabolic Networks and Pathways / Q000235:genetics; D010944:Plants / Q000235:genetics* / Q000378:metabolism*