Bioproduction of Muconic Acid in Plants

The vast majority of bioengineering efforts for the production of commodity chemicals have been pursued in microorganisms, due to the ease of genetically manipulating and optimizing metabolic pathways in microbes such as E. coli and yeast. With improvements in plant synthetic biology tools and increasing interest in leveraging plants as a bioplatform for production of biologics or industrially-relevant chemicals, we explore the potential of using plant-based production of the chemical muconic acid – an intermediate molecule that can be derived into several bioplastics. Most biological approaches have focused on producing muconic acid from a glucose feedstock in microbes. Here, we test and optimize various metabolic routes for the production of muconic acid within plants, enabling the direct production of muconic acid via photosynthesis. Plant-based metabolic engineering efforts may enable a more sustainable means of producing chemicals of interest and decrease our dependence on current practices that are heavily dependent on petroleum feedstocks.