An outlook on metabolic pathway engineering in crop plants

Abstract

To produce the essential secondary metabolites, plants are the major and important target source materials for conducting the high-profile metabolic engineering studies. Metabolic pathway engineering of both microorganism targets and plants target contribute towards important drug discovery. In order to efficiently work out in advanced plant metabolic pathway engineering techniques, a detailed knowledge and expertise is essentially needed regarding the plant cell physiology and the mechanics of plant metabolism. Mathematical and statistical models to scale and map the genome for integrative metabolic pathway activity, signal transduction mechanism in the genome, gene regulation and the networks of protein-protein interaction can provide the in-depth knowledge to work efficiently on plant metabolic pathway engineering studies. Incorporation of omics data into these statistical and mathematical models is crucial in the case of drug discovery using the plant system. Recently, artificial intelligence concept and approaches are experimentally applied for efficient and accurate metabolic engineering in plants.