Plants produce an impressive array of molecules important for both plant and human health. The discovery of biosynthetic pathways for plant natural products has classically been a slow process; as a consequence, few complete pathways are known and even fewer have been engineered. New plant genome sequences and synthetic biology tools have opened the door to three transformative research areas under investigation in my lab: 1) Identifying the minimum set of enzymes required to make known plant-derived molecules and non-natural derivatives through metabolic engineering, and 2) discovering new molecules from plants, and 3) developing new strategies to sustainably enhance plant fitness. In this talk, I will describe some of our recent efforts to accelerate the discovery and engineering of complete plant pathways for known and novel molecules, not only in the model plant Arabidopsis but also in non-model plants.

Discovery and engineering of plant chemistry for plant and human health

251st National Meeting (2016)

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