title: Metabolic engineering to enhance the value of plants as green factories.
abstract: The promise of plants to serve as the green factories of the future is ever increasing. Plants have been used traditionally for construction, energy, food and feed. Bioactive compounds primarily derived from specialized plant metabolism continue to serve as important scaffold molecules for pharmaceutical drug production. Yet, the past few years have witnessed a growing interest on plants as the ultimate harvesters of carbon and energy from the sun, providing carbohydrate and lipid biofuels that would contribute to balancing atmospheric carbon. How can the metabolic output from plants be increased even further, and what are the bottlenecks? Here, we present what we perceive to be the main opportunities and challenges associated with increasing the efficiency of plants as chemical factories. We offer some perspectives on when it makes sense to use plants as production systems because the amount of biomass needed makes any other system unfeasible. However, there are other instances in which plants serve as great sources of biological catalysts, yet are not necessarily the best-suited systems for production. We also present emerging opportunities for manipulating plant genomes to make plant synthetic biology a reality.
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, University of Kentucky, 1401 University Drive, Lexington, KY 40546, United States.
authors.forename: Ling
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yuan
authors.affiliation: Center for Applied Plant Sciences (CAPS), Department of Molecular Genetics and Department of Horticulture and Crop Science, The Ohio State University, 012 Rightmire Hall, 1060 Carmack Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, United States. Electronic address: grotewold.1@osu.edu.
authors.forename: Erich
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Grotewold
mesh_terms: D018745:Genome, Plant; D060847:Metabolic Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D030821:Plants, Genetically Modified / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism
keywords: Commodity chemicals; Plant metabolic engineering; Specialized metabolism; Synthetic biology