Metabolic engineering of pathways and gene discovery

Abstract

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010. All rights reserved. Humans have been manipulating the genetic information of plants throughout the history of agriculture. In this respect, every new plant variety or animal race is a result of the introduction of novel metabolic changes. This process has been slowly advancing for millennia. However, with the discovery of biochemical pathways and later with the introduction of gene manipulation techniques in 1970s, the pace greatly speeded up. Already in the mid-1980s, many of the compounds and enzymes participating in metabolic pathways were linked to their cloned genes, which can then be used for engineering the plant metabolism. Soon, novel products from plants appeared including, vaccines and other pharmaceuticals, plastics, and proteins that may render certain plants as effective tools for environmental decontamination. These products were a result of the manipulation of plant endogenous biochemical pathways and thus the novel field of science-metabolic engineering was born. Metabolic engineering can be defined as the targeted and purposeful modification of metabolic pathways in an organism for the improved use of cellular pathways for chemical transformation, energy transduction, and macromolecular synthesis or breakdown, potentially benefiting the society by producing biological substitutes for toxic chemicals, increasing agricultural production, improving industrial fermentation processes, producing completely new compounds, or by understanding the molecular mechanism underlying medical conditions in order to develop new cures (Kurnaz 2005).