Dear Colleagues,

Plant drugs have been used for thousands of years to treat various diseases, and they have contributed to the development of numerous modern medicines. Plant natural products (PNPs), which include terpenoids, alkaloids, polyketides, and phenylpropanoids, are an important family of compounds with numerous attractive activities, such as antioxidation, antitumor, anti-inflammatory, and analgesic properties. PNPs are widely used in medicine, cosmetics, health products, condiments, pigments, and other high-value fields. Traditionally, PNPs are mainly extracted from wild and/or cultivated plants, but this route suffers from obvious disadvantages, such as low yield, high cost, and fluctuating supply. However, the flourishing synthetic biology in recent years provides a new route for the biosynthesis of PNPs in microbial hosts.

By elucidating the pathway and discovering the key enzymes of PNP biosynthesis, synthetic biology strategies can be employed to build microbial cell factories to produce PNPs or PNP intermediates. These cell factories can continuously and efficiently synthesize low-carbon, economic, and environmentally friendly PNPs, which will provide an alternative approach to the current route of plant extraction. The performance of PNPs microbial cell factories can be further improved by mining and/or engineering key pathway enzymes, increasing substrate import, enhancing cofactors’ supply, minimizing byproducts’ formation, alleviating metabolic burden, accelerating product export, and so on. Enzyme engineering and artificial biosynthetic route construction can also be used to create novel PNP derivatives.

The scope of this Special Issue is to address the potential and challenges to achieve efficient synthesis of various PNPs in microbial cells. This Special Issue will cover topics related to the microbial cell factory, plant natural products, bioactive compounds, synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, metabolic regulation, metabolic pathway, and microbial fermentation. These studies will help researchers and engineers to make use of various metabolic research strategies, achieving the goal of cost-effective microbial production of PNPs.

Dr. Zaigao Tan
Dr. Tao Liu
Dr. Wei Zhou
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Bioengineering is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• microbial cell factory
• plant natural products
• bioactive compounds
• synthetic biology
• metabolic engineering
• metabolic regulation
• metabolic pathway
• microbial fermentation