Pathway engineering for functional isoprenoids

Pathway engineering is to engineer biosynthetic pathways for compounds of interests in heterologous organisms such as microbes and higher plants, which has also been one of the most important fields in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. This review focuses on pathway engineering researches for the production of functional isoprenoids containing monoterpenes, sesquiterpenes, diterpenes, and triterpenes as well as carotenoids and for the elucidation of relevant biosynthesis genes and enzymes, which have been performed in the last two years. As microbial hosts, Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae have often been employed, since they, specifically the former, are fully amenable to genetic manipulations with extensive molecular resources. Various crops have also been used as the hosts for engineering pathways of functional isoprenoids of the plant origin, particularly carotenoids.

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► Pathway engineering is to engineer biosynthetic pathways for compounds of interests in heterologous organisms.
► Pathway engineering for the efficient production of functional isoprenoids has been performed with microbial hosts.
► Understanding biosynthetic pathways of the isoprenoids are important for their heterologous production.
► This review focuses on advances achieved in such pathway engineering fields for the last two years.