Journal
PLANT SCIENCE
Volume 208, Issue -, Pages 58-63Publisher
ELSEVIER IRELAND LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.plantsci.2013.03.012
Keywords
Carotenoid biosynthesis; Plants; Plastids; Plant biochemistry; Metabolic engineering; Biosynthetic pathways
Categories
Funding
- US National Institutes of Health
- Rockefeller Foundation International Rice Biotechnology Program
- McKnight Foundation
- American Cancer Society
- US National Science Foundation
- United States Department of Agriculture, PSC-CUNY, and New York State
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The carotenoid biosynthetic pathway serves manifold roles in plants related to photosynthesis, photoprotection, development, stress hormones, and various volatiles and signaling apocarotenoids. The pathway also produces compounds that impact human nutrition and metabolic products that contribute to fragrance and flavor of food and non-food crops. It is no surprise that the pathway has been a target of metabolic engineering, most prominently in the case of Golden Rice. The future success and predictability of metabolic engineering of carotenoids rests in the ability to target carotenoids for specific physiological purposes as well as to simultaneously modify carotenoids along with other desired traits. Here, we ask whether predictive metabolic engineering of the carotenoid pathway is indeed possible. Despite a long history of research on the pathway, at this point in time we can only describe the pathway as a parts list and have almost no knowledge of the location of the complete pathway, how it is assembled, and whether there exists any trafficking of the enzymes or the carotenoids themselves. We discuss the current state of knowledge regarding the complete pathway and make the argument that predictive metabolic engineering of the carotenoid pathway (and other pathways) will require investigation of the three dimensional state of the pathway as it may exist in plastids of different ultrastructures. Along with this message we point out the need to develop new types of visualization tools and resources that better reflect the dynamic nature of biosynthetic pathways. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
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