Synthetic Metabolism and Its Significance in Agriculture
Abstract Green revolution could significantly attenuate the effects of food scarcity during the last century. Advancements in the field of crop biotechnology, genomics, and genome engineering have explored the possible ways for substantial improvement in the yield and nutritional quality parameters of agricultural crops. Modern tools in genomics and molecular biology have tremendously assisted in understanding the molecular mechanism underlying the regulation of several metabolic pathways. This has helped in constructing unnatural/modified metabolic pathways and organisms. Plants, microbes, algae, and yeast are popular chasses for manipulation of target functions. Together with metabolic engineering, synthetic biology is helpful for mammoth scale production of target metabolites. The aim of this chapter is to illuminate current advancements and trends in synthetic biology, an emerging interdisciplinary area of biology that integrates bioinformatics, engineering, and genomics to enhance the food value, yield parameters, and tolerance to wide array of conditions in the plants.