Abstract
Plants are the source of various natural compounds with pharmaceutical and nutraceutical importance which have shown numerous health benefits with relatively fewer side effects. However, extraction of these compounds from native producers cannot meet the ever-increasing demands of the growing population due to, among other things, the limited production of the active compound(s). Their production depends upon the metabolic demands of the plant and is also subjected to environmental conditions, abundance of crop species and seasonal variations. Moreover, their extraction from plants requires complex downstream processing and can also lead to the extinction of many useful plant varieties. Microbial engineering is one of the alternative approaches which can meet the global demand for natural products in an eco-friendly manner. Metabolic engineering of microbes or pathway reconstruction using synthetic biology tools and novel enzymes lead to the generation of a diversity of compounds (like flavonoids, stilbenes, anthocyanins etc.) and their natural and non-natural derivatives. Strain and pathway optimization, pathway regulation and tolerance engineering have produced microbial cell factories into which the metabolic pathway of plants can be introduced for the production of compounds of interest on an industrial scale in an economical and eco-friendly way. While microbial production of phytochemicals needs to further increase product titer if it is ever to become a commercial success. The present review covers the advancements made for the improvement of microbial cell factories in order to increase the product titer of recombinant polyphenolic compounds.
Highlights
Natural products that are produced as a result of plant metabolism, commonly referred to as phytochemicals, represent an enormous repository of bioactive compounds having pharmaceutical and biotechnological importance
Low toxicity displayed by many phytochemicals and better success rates of natural products entering into a phase I testing (25 versus 6% of conventional chemicals) are the major advantages of using these compounds in human applications (Schmid, 2003)
Ring C is variously modified by methylation, methoxylation, alkylation, oxidation, C- and O-glycosylation, rearrangement, and hydroxylation, chemical modifications which lead to the formation of more than 9,000 flavonoid derivatives
Summary
Sonam Chouhan1†, Kanika Sharma1†, Jian Zha2†, Sanjay Guleria and Mattheos A. Plants are the source of various natural compounds with pharmaceutical and nutraceutical importance which have shown numerous health benefits with relatively fewer side effects Extraction of these compounds from native producers cannot meet the ever-increasing demands of the growing population due to, among other things, the limited production of the active compound(s). Their production depends upon the metabolic demands of the plant and is subjected to environmental conditions, abundance of crop species and seasonal variations. The present review covers the advancements made for the improvement of microbial cell factories in order to increase the product titer of recombinant polyphenolic compounds
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