Research Information System
in: Applications of Plant Molecular Farming, Chittaranjan Kole,Anurag Chaurasia,Kathleen L. Hefferon,Jogeswar Panigrahi, Editor, Springer, London/Berlin , Singapore, pp.487-513, 2024
Plant natural products have assumed pivotal roles within the food, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical sectors, serving as invaluable sources of fragrances, flavors, and medicinal compounds owing to their extensive structural heterogeneity and versatile array of bioactivities, encompassing antimicrobial, anticancer, antifungal, antiviral, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory properties, among others. Currently, their production predominantly hinges on two primary methods: direct extraction from plant sources and chemical synthesis. Nevertheless, both have their own bottlenecks such as dependence on climate and region, long production time, low yield, and heavy metal, strong acid and large amount organic solvent use. These drawbacks often make them costly, environmentally-unfriendly and time-consuming, and necessitate alternative green, cost-effective and short-time production strategies. Microbial production unquestionably emerges as a promising avenue to cost-effectively produce pharmaceutically important plant natural products in a short time with less damage to environment. This chapter delves into the successful examples of microbial production of plant natural products. Particularly, it centers its attention on the microbial biosynthesis of flavonoids and carotenoids in genetically engineered host microorganisms. All the examples in the chapter, specifically high yield generating ones, clearly indicate that engineered microorganisms with the help of cutting-edge synthetic biology and metabolic engineering strategies hold a huge potential to furnish an economically feasible and environmentally sustainable alternative for the synthesis of plant natural products.