Abstract
The present increase of the human population provokes higher demands for food, combustible and raw materials that may cause short-medium term famine and scarcity. The use of enzyme engineering techniques in plants could contribute to palliate these global problems. Enzyme engineering is changing the chemical and pharmaceutical industries and opens new possibilities, although until now the use of these techniques in plants is very limited. The new techniques employed in Plant Sciences, such as transformation of herbaceous crops and trees, the increasing number of full sequenced plant genomes, and the chemical diversity of plants can support a rapid development of enzyme engineering in plants. In the future, the application of enzyme engineering techniques could increase the crop yield or facilitate the biofuel production.
Highlights
The present increase of the human population provokes higher demands for food, combustible and raw materials that may cause short-medium term famine and scarcity
The use of enzyme engineering techniques in plants could contribute to palliate these global problems by improving crop yield and qualities
An example is the modification of bacterial glyphosate N-acetyltransferases, improving its efficiency four orders and conferring an increased tolerance of Arabidopsis, tobacco and maize to the herbicide glyphosate, when the engineered enzymes were expressed in the plants [19]
Summary
The present increase of the human population provokes higher demands for food, combustible and raw materials that may cause short-medium term famine and scarcity. The use of enzyme engineering techniques in plants could contribute to palliate these global problems by improving crop yield and qualities. It is known that plants have an enormous chemical diversity, which confers a great potential to work with enzymes with new functions [13].
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