Applications for Synthetic Biology in Industrial Biotechnology 2013

With their provenance as an excellent source of pharmaceutical, neutraceutical and health promoting chemistries, plant natural products are an attractive target for biotechnological development for industrialization so as to make them more widely available. To realize this potential, two strategies are currently being employed whereby the associated metabolic pathways are engineered in planta, or are ectopically expressed in microbial hosts and produced through fermentation. In both cases it is clear that recent developments in genetics, and our understanding of metabolism are providing us with unprecedented tools to fast-track these ambitions. In addition, the advent of synthetic biology, where approaches more commonly employed in engineering are applied to design and optimize bioprocesses has much to offer industrial biotechnology in the future.

In this meeting a series of metabolic engineering programs representing each of the differing strategies for natural product biosynthesis will be presented and the potential merits of plant Vs microbial industrial biotechnology discussed, along with projections as to how each might benefit from synthetic biology based approaches. In addition to reviewing the latest development in plant natural product biochemistry and molecular biology, the meeting will be formative in shaping thinking as to how and where new approaches like synthetic biology can be best applied in industrial biotechnology in the coming years.