Gene

Engineering

Ecology

Biotechnology

Biology

Biochemistry

Computer science

Computational biology

Paleontology

Biochemical engineering

Metabolic pathway

Biosynthesis

Enzyme

Natural (archaeology)

Metabolic engineering

Chemical biology

Host (biology)

Synthetic biology

Nature Communications

Metabolic engineers endeavor to create a bio-based manufacturing industry using microbes to produce fuels, chemicals, and medicines. Plant natural products (PNPs) are historically challenging to produce and are ubiquitous in medicines, flavors, and fragrances. Engineering PNP pathways into new hosts requires finding or modifying a suitable host to accommodate the pathway, planning and implementing a biosynthetic route to the compound, and discovering or engineering enzymes for missing steps. In this review, we describe recent developments in metabolic engineering at the level of host, pathway, and enzyme, and discuss how the field is approaching ever more complex biosynthetic opportunities.

Synthetic biology strategies for microbial biosynthesis of plant natural products