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Biological synthesis unbounded?

Nature Biotechnology volume 33, pages 1148–1149 (2015)Cite this article

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Chemical synthesis of specialty and commodity products still reigns supreme but greener, metabolic engineering approaches are gaining ground.

Since the emergence of metabolic engineering as a codified discipline some 25 years ago, engineered microbial systems have increasingly been touted as a viable means for the replacement of traditional manufacturing in the synthesis of certain chemicals. With fermentation-derived 1,3-propanediol replacing the chemically synthesized product in 2006 and yeast-derived artemisinin displacing the product extracted from plants in 2013, and with several other products now in advanced stages of commercialization, evidence is mounting that biology can provide alternative paths to useful molecules. A recent report by Smolke and colleagues1 describing the synthesis of opiates from glucose in an engineered yeast represents another such breakthrough. So, have we now reached the point where we are ready to declare biology on par with chemistry for manufacturing? Not quite yet.

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Figure 1: A decision tree for designing a high-throughput screen for detecting a metabolic product.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brian F. Pfleger is at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA,

    Brian F Pfleger

  2. Kristala L.J. Prather is in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Kristala L J Prather

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  1. Brian F Pfleger
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  2. Kristala L J Prather
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Correspondence to Brian F Pfleger or Kristala L J Prather.

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Pfleger, B., Prather, K. Biological synthesis unbounded?. Nat Biotechnol 33, 1148–1149 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3399

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