Biosynthetic Pathways, Regulation, and Metabolic Engineering of Plant Bioactive Compounds
A Special Issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067) belonging to the section "Molecular Plant Sciences".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 25 April 2027
Editor
Interests: plant specialized metabolism; terpenoids; phenylpropanoids; synthetic biology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Plants produce a vast array of bioactive specialized metabolites with potent anticancer, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and antioxidant activities, essential for human health and medicine. Unlike primary metabolites, these compounds aid plant adaptation to environmental stress, but their structural complexity makes chemical synthesis uneconomical and natural extraction often low yielding and unsustainable. Thus, understanding, reprogramming, and engineering their biosynthetic machinery is urgently needed.
Recent advances in genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and synthetic biology now enable the complete decoding of biosynthetic gene clusters, pathway enzymes, and regulatory networks involving transcription factors, non-coding RNAs, and post-translational modifications. This knowledge reveals how plants control metabolic flux and spatiotemporal accumulation, identifying key targets for engineering.
Metabolic engineering and synthetic biology translate this understanding into practical solutions—from precise endogenous modification (genome editing, promoter engineering, transcription factor overexpression) to reconstructing entire pathways in heterologous hosts like yeast, tobacco, or microbes. Beyond boosting yields, these approaches generate novel analogs with improved bioactivity. Meanwhile, plant cells, tissues, and organ cultures remain scalable platforms where elicitation and environmental cues tightly regulate production.
This Special Issue invites original research and reviews that dissect the biosynthesis and regulation of plant bioactive compounds and apply metabolic engineering or synthetic biology to enhance their production, advancing both mechanistic insight and applied capabilities.
Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Biosynthetic pathway discovery and enzyme characterization;
- Transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory networks;
- Environmental signals and elicitors governing pathway activation;
- In planta engineering (genome editing, promoter engineering);
- Heterologous reconstruction and synthetic biology tools for pathway optimization;
- Multi-omics integration, precursor/cofactor supply, and scale-up strategies.
Dr. Fei Zhou
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- plant bioactive compounds
- specialized metabolism
- biosynthetic pathways
- metabolic regulation
- metabolic engineering
- synthetic biology
- heterologous production
- multi-omics
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