Route To Artificially Synthesize Plant Natural Products

Plant natural products and their derivatives are the important reservoirs for the development of medicines, health products and food additives. The synthetic biology technology brings new strategies to manufacture rare plant natural products with complicated structures at large scale by artificially constructing and optimizing the biosynthesis pathway of target compounds in microbial chassis cells. In this paper, the research progress on the artificial syntheses of important plant natural products such as artemisinin, ginsenosides, morphinan alkaloids, paclitaxel and vinblastine is reviewed. These examples not only demonstrate the great potentials of synthetic biology as well as its combination with synthetic chemistry applied in the artificial syntheses of plant natural compounds, but also show us the roadmap for future research and development on de novo synthesis of plant natural products. New technologies developed in synthetic biology and synthetic chemistry would further promote the unveiling of biosynthetic pathways of complex natural compounds, the discovery and characterization of key bioparts, the design and building of novel chassis cells, the strong-strong combination of biosynthesis and chemical synthesis, and thus accelerate the process to transfer the developed technologies to artificially synthesize plant natural products from laboratories to markets.