Engineering of plants for the production of commercially important products: Approaches and accomplishments

Abstract

For centuries humans have used plants as a source of food, fi ber, fuel, and medicine because they have the ability to synthesize a vast array of complex organic compounds using light, carbon dioxide, and water. Advances in recombinant DNA and transgenic technologies during the last several decades have opened many new avenues to further exploit plants for production of many novel products. The potential to use plants to synthesize diverse native and nonnative industrial and pharmaceutical products coupled with the depletion of fossil fuels that are the source of many commercially important products and the adverse effects of chemical synthesis of platform chemicals on the environment have renewed considerable interest in using plants for large-scale production of chemicals and valueadded compounds. To accomplish this, different genetic engineering and transformation strategies have been developed for introducing multiple genes (gene stacking), modulating their expression with regulatable promoters, and targeting the products to a specifi c compartment in the cells. Successful metabolic engineering of plants should lead to sustained production of platform chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and biopolymers. In this chapter, we present an overview of different methods that are currently used to introduce and manipulate expression of one or more genes into lants and discuss some of the recent achievements in producing valueadded products and pharmaceuticals in plants.