抄録
The evolution of enzyme function is the driving force behind the metabolic diversity of plant natural product biosynthesis. Synthetic biology involves the reduction of biological systems to their basic components and the engineering of new processes through the novel assembly of these parts. The PhytoMetaSyn Project (www.phytometasyn.ca) is a consortium of Canadian researchers whose goals are to establish a functional genomics pipeline to characterize plant natural product biosynthetic genes and to establish a process engineering technology to deploy these genes in yeast. We are using massively parallel DNA sequencing to probe the expressed genomes of plants producing bioactive metabolites. Robust bioinformatics and targeted metabolite profiling allows the selection of candidate genes. The project will deliver (1) a public repository of transcriptome libraries from 75 non-model plants; (2) engineered yeast strains producing plant metabolites; (3) a catalogue of biocatalysts for plug-and-play synthetic biology; (4) an efficient functional genomics strategy for identifying unknown plant biosynthetic genes; and (5) an analysis of associated regulatory, ethical, and economic issues.
