About this Research Topic
Plants are prodigious producers of natural products, with many of them being the foundation for drugs or being directly used as effective drugs to cure disease, especially with the use of herb natural products in traditional Chinese medicine. Usually, the composition of these natural products in plants are often low, and the plant natural product production depends greatly on the developmental stage or physiological conditions of the plant. Moreover, many plants containing high-value compounds are difficult to cultivate, and plant growth is strongly affected by climate change, pest damage and microbial disease. This results in a limited supply of effective plant natural products. Therefore, the production of plant-derived natural products in a heterogenous host will be an alternative way to improve and increase their production. Compared with other plant and fungal species, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and other yeasts are easy to genetically manipulate, and some of them have been used as hosts for the generation of non-native chemicals. Recently, the development of yeast genetic engineering strategies, such as genome editing methods and genome-scale models, enables yeasts to be efficient microbial cell factories for plant-derived natural products by global metabolic rewiring.
Methods for engineering yeasts as microbial cell factories for plant natural products are still developing, and will encounter some bottlenecks and challenges, such as high-level expression of natural product biosynthetic pathways, keystone enzyme engineering and optimization, balancing primary and secondary metabolic flux, metabolic flux redistribution towards targeted natural products, and adaptive evolution-based strain optimization. In addition, fermentation strategies and efficient downstream process technology has yet to be applied for the large-scale production of plant-derived natural products in yeasts. Therefore, this Research Topic will cover the useful and effective strategies for the sustainable and economic production of plant-derived natural products in yeasts.
This Research Topic welcomes articles on, but not limited to, the following topic areas:
• Genetics and systems biology tools for complex biosynthetic pathway in yeasts
• Pathway engineering of plant natural product in yeasts
• Metabolic engineering of yeasts for enhancing natural products production
• Computational tools for genome mining of secondary metabolism genes
• Systems biology and multi-omics integration of secondary metabolism in yeasts
• Downstream strategies for large-scale production of plant natural products
• Other challenges in developing yeasts as plant natural product cell factories
Methods for engineering yeasts as microbial cell factories for plant natural products are still developing, and will encounter some bottlenecks and challenges, such as high-level expression of natural product biosynthetic pathways, keystone enzyme engineering and optimization, balancing primary and secondary metabolic flux, metabolic flux redistribution towards targeted natural products, and adaptive evolution-based strain optimization. In addition, fermentation strategies and efficient downstream process technology has yet to be applied for the large-scale production of plant-derived natural products in yeasts. Therefore, this Research Topic will cover the useful and effective strategies for the sustainable and economic production of plant-derived natural products in yeasts.
This Research Topic welcomes articles on, but not limited to, the following topic areas:
• Genetics and systems biology tools for complex biosynthetic pathway in yeasts
• Pathway engineering of plant natural product in yeasts
• Metabolic engineering of yeasts for enhancing natural products production
• Computational tools for genome mining of secondary metabolism genes
• Systems biology and multi-omics integration of secondary metabolism in yeasts
• Downstream strategies for large-scale production of plant natural products
• Other challenges in developing yeasts as plant natural product cell factories
Keywords: Yeasts, Metabolic Engineering, Plant Natural Products, Synthetic Biology, Biotechnology
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
