Plants are bona fide sustainable organisms because they accumulate carbon and synthesize beneficial metabolites from photosynthesis. To meet the challenges to food security and health threatened by increasing population growth and depletion of nonrenewable natural resources, recent metabolic engineering efforts have shifted from single pathways to holistic approaches with multiple genes owing to integration of omics technologies. Successful engineering of plants results in the high yield of biomass components for primary food sources and biofuel feedstocks, pharmaceuticals, and platform chemicals through synthetic biology and systems biology strategies. Further discovery of undefined biosynthesis pathways in plants, integrative analysis of discrete omics data, and diversified process developments for production of platform chemicals are essential to overcome the hurdles for sustainable production of value-added biomolecules from plants.This talk highlight progress in engineering with plants using several examples from my group's research: use of13C based metabolic flux mapping of central carbon metabolism for improvement of soybean composition; microbes engineered with plant genes in order to produce reduced carbon molecules; alkaloid production in the medicinal plant Catharanthus roseus; explosives (TNT, RDX) metabolism in terrestrial and aquatic plants and hydrocarbon synthesis pathways in algae and selected plant tissues.

Metabolic engineering with plants or plant parts for a sustainable biobased economy

247th National Meeting (2014)

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