Description

Tomato offers a useful chassis for metabolic engineering, with significant advantages over other chassis: (a) it is high yielding, easy to grow and manage with existing tomato cultivation infrastructure; (b) fruit contain most of the necessary substrates; (c) fruit contain the whole or most of the biosynthetic pathways for making high-value metabolites and activity can be further enhanced by engineering the activity of transcription factors; (d) genome sequence is available with many additional tools and resources that facilitate metabolic engineering; (e) fruit-specific production of secondary metabolites usually does not incur a yield penalty nor affect the growth of the plant.

Flow

Pathway

Reference

Li Y, Wang H, Zhang Y, et al. Can the world’s favorite fruit, tomato, provide an effective biosynthetic chassis for high-value metabolites? [J]. Plant cell reports, 2018, 37(10): 1443-1450.