CRISPR-based metabolic editing: Next-generation metabolic engineering in plants

Plants generate many secondary metabolites, so called phyto-metabolites, which can be used as toxins, dyes, drugs, and insecticides in bio-warfare plus bio-terrorism, industry, medicine, and agriculture, respectively. To 2013, the first generation metabolic engineering approaches like miRNA-based manipulation were widely adopted by researchers in biosciences. However, the discovery of the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) genome editing system revolutionized metabolic engineering due to its unique features so that scientists could manipulate the biosynthetic pathways of phyto-metabolites through approaches like miRNA-mediated CRISPR-Cas9. According to the increasing importance of the genome editing in plant sciences, we discussed the current findings on CRISPR-based manipulation of phyto-metabolites in plants, especially medicinal ones, and suggested the ideas to phyto-metabolic editing.