Plants are an invaluable source of bioactive compounds, known as plant specialized metabolites, that are extensively used in nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, food, and cosmetic industries. However, the commercial utilization of these compounds is hindered by several challenges. Firstly, their low yield in native host plants (less than 1% of plant dry-weight) and species and tissue-specific accumulation limit their production. Additionally, the complex stereochemistry of plant specialized metabolites makes chemical synthesis challenging, often requiring the use of environmentally unfriendly solvents. Furthermore, the efficient biosynthesis of these compounds often necessitates the presence of tailoring enzymes, such as cytochrome P450s and dioxygenases, which work optimally only in specific microenvironments. However, the unique cellular organization of plants, including subcellular compartments such as plastids, mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum (ER), golgi apparatus, peroxisomes, and lipid droplets, presents an opportunity for the advancement of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. These advancements offer tools to redirect pathway enzymes and harness the plant's subcellular compartments to engineer enzymes of different families for the biosynthesis of plant specialized metabolites. This approach holds promise for enhancing the production of these valuable compounds, thereby addressing the challenges associated with their commercial use.

The short life cycles and well-defined genetic tools of microbes often make them a favored choice for the heterologous biosynthesis of specialized plant metabolites. However, the development of a microbial strain for this purpose typically necessitates extensive metabolic engineering and multiple cycles of design, build, test, and learn (DBTL) iterations. Moreover, microbes often exhibit poor tolerance to the intermediates of plant pathways, and scaling up the process requires costly fermentation equipment. In contrast, plants present a compelling and cost-effective alternative for reconstructing the biosynthetic pathways of specialized metabolites. Subcellular compartments in plants provide the necessary cofactors, raw materials and microenvironments that may allow better accumulation of specialized metabolites.

The scope of the Research Topic includes original research and review articles focused on harnessing plant subcellular compartments towards specialized metabolite biosynthesis. The scope includes, but is not limited to:

• Novel strategies to redirect metabolites to different subcellular compartments
• Plastid engineering for enhanced accumulation of plant specialized metabolites
• Novel gene-delivery strategies to different compartments
• Modulating the flux in subcellular compartments like chloroplasts, peroxisomes, mitochondria, ER
• Novel synthetic biology approaches for delivering synthetic construct to organelles

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Frontiers in Genome Editing

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