Metabolic Engineering for Sustainable Food and Agricultural Production

The growing world population has led to increasing demand for food and agricultural products, which consume a massive amount of natural and human resources worldwide. Metabolic engineering is a robust tool for modifying, improving, or adjusting the metabolic pathways in either crop plants or microorganisms for them to sustainably produce higher productivity, better nutritional value, and higher amounts of bioactive compounds for them to be able to sustain the growth and development under harsh environmental extremes. Novel insights on metabolic engineering for sustainable food and agricultural production in plants and microorganism is therefore inevitably necessary to achieve the global goals of food security and sustainability.

In this Research Topic, we aim to highlight the recent advances in metabolic engineering in economically important crops and microorganisms. This Research Topic will also highlight how implementing recent metabolic engineering technologies could provide unique opportunities to address global challenges in both the agricultural and the food industries and how these implementations could accelerate the goals of food security and sustainability.

This Research Topic aims to emphasize the recent advances in metabolic engineering attempts in both economically important crops and microorganisms. A special focus will be put on implementing recent metabolic engineering technologies and how they could lead to higher productivity, better nutritional value, a higher number of bioactive compounds, or better tolerance under harsh environmental stressors. We welcome original research and review articles including but not limited to the following themes:
• Metabolic engineering for grain or cereal crop biofortification
• Metabolic engineering for value-added crop and microorganism-derived food products
• Metabolic engineering for increasing bioactive compound production
• Metabolic engineering for increasing crop productivity
• Metabolic engineering for sustainable crop production under biotic and abiotic stresses
• Development of metabolic engineering tools and technologies

Keywords: Crop engineering, Food production, Agricultural production, Sustainability, Metabolic engineering, Biofortification

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.