Synthetic Biology approaches for the production of next generation chemicals: from natural products to new-to-nature molecules

With the growing concerns surrounding climate change and greenhouse emissions, new solutions are needed to reduce chemistry footprint, waste, toxicity and energy use in modern society. Natural products comprise a rich source of chemicals produced by plants or microbes for various ecological roles. These compounds have found important applications in such prominent industries as healthcare, agriculture, food, fine chemicals, and more recently, biofuels. Their biotechnological production in engineered organisms holds great promise as cost-effective and sustainable alternative to inefficient chemical synthesis and limited natural resources. Synthetic biology has revolutionized natural products research in the last decades at an unpredictable speed, emerging as a foreseeable disruptive technology in energy and chemical production sectors. Recent breakthroughs have been reported for microbial production of artemisinin, farnesene, resveratrol or, more recently, cannabinoids. Moreover, synthetic biology approaches have been developed for the production of noncanonical molecules by engineering synthetic (artificial) pathways in microorganisms to expand the untapped nature’s chemical diversity.

Biotechnological production of many compounds still requires long development times due to challenges starting from incomplete understanding of their biosynthetic pathways and regulation to insufficient yields. In particular, efficiency of production decreases with increasing structural complexity required for potent bioactivities or other applications. The overall goal of this Research Topic is to bring together the latest synthetic biology approaches for the production of valuable chemicals in engineered organisms. Current efforts are directed toward developing high-throughput technologies and engineering strategies at different levels from molecules to complex pathways and from single cells to communities. Therefore, this Research Topic covers new discoveries and new methods of direct relevance for the generation of natural products or molecules not existing in nature and engineering advanced platforms for sustainable production of chemicals.

The scope of this Research Topic is to highlight Synthetic Biology advances in Natural Products research. This topic is committed to the publication of Original Research and Review articles on, but not limited to, the following themes:

- Next generation of synthetic biosystems for production of natural products
- Novel biocatalysts and cell free production systems for natural products
- Subcellular compartmentalization of biosynthetic pathways
- Smart biosensors for high-throughput approaches
- Development of minimal production platforms
- Microbial consortia for natural product synthesis
- (Meta)-omics tools for natural products pathway elucidation
- New-to nature artificial pathways and molecules
- Engineering biomolecular regulators in specialized biosynthetic pathway
- Safety, security, and ethics in natural products research