Plant Metabolic Genetic Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

Innumerable chemicals that fulfill the needs of human beings are produced through complex biosynthetic pathways in the plant kingdom. Because of the acceleration of global problems such as species extinction, disease, plague, starvation, and population growth, we now have to rethink the availability of these natural compounds. Plant metabolic engineering is an effective and beneficial strategy in producing desired chemicals or other products, such as edible vaccines, in a short amount of time and requiring little space. By applying plant metabolic engineering, natural compounds can be produced in higher quantities, and newer metabolites can even be envisaged in genetically modified plants, which can also effectively avoid the side effects of chemical engineering. To boost the development of genetically modified plants, there is an urgent need to invent new technologies for the rapid identification of metabolites and isolate the key genes involved in the biosynthesis or regulation of these metabolites.

In this Special Issue, we ask for contributions relating to plant metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. We would like to focus on metabolite identification, the isolation of key structural and/or regulatory genes, and precise genome engineering. We believe that quantitative approaches in metabolite analysis will help to reduce the time required to establish an efficient whole-cell biocatalyst, and the systems biology approach is helpful in reducing these unnecessary experiments at the wet-lab level and refining our targets (genes/enzymes) in the application of metabolic engineering. Therefore, successful examples of plant metabolic engineering using synthetic biology tools are also welcomed. We believe that slow but steady progress in plant metabolic engineering will soon result in a miracle growth in this field of research, and provide solutions for global challenges.

Dr. Yanjie Zhang
Dr. Yan Li
Guest Editors

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