Narrowing the gap between the promise and reality of polyketide synthases as a synthetic biology platform

- Modular polyketide synthases have the potential to produce many existing and novel compounds.
- Accessible compounds include several commodity chemicals with large markets.
- The potential of polyketide synthases greatly surpasses our current ability to engineer them.
- We suggest adopting a design-build-test-learn paradigm for engineering polyketide synthases.
- We suggest several strategies to improve the design-build-test-learn cycle.