Heterologous Biosynthesis of Plant Secondary Metabolites Derived from Phenylpropanoid and Flavonoid Pathway in Escherichia coli

Plant secondary metabolites involve various groups of natural products which have diverse applications. Though these compounds are used widely for human healthcare or industrial processes, they are generated extremely low by plants naturally. For this reason, there have been many attempts to produce plant secondary metabolites by chemical synthesis or plant cell culture but they are not enough to meet the industrial needs. Together with the development of synthetic biotechnology, demands on sustainable resources of natural products make heterologous production of those compounds attractive. In this situation, we suggest heterologous biosynthesis of plant secondary metabolites using Escherichia coli as a platform strain. By introducing plant genes in phenylpropanoid and flavonoid pathway to E. coli, biosynthesis of secondary metabolites (i.e., coumaric acid, caffeic acid, ferulic acid, coniferyl alcohol, naringenin, taxifolin) could be achieved. [This work was supported by the Technology Development Program to Solve Climate Changes on Systems Metabolic Engineering for Biorefineries from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP) through the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea (NRF-2012M1A2A2026556 and NRF-2012M1A2A2026557).]