Research Progress on Plant Metabolic Pathway Reconstruction Strategies Integrating Gene Editing and Synthetic Biology and Their Application in High-Value Product Synthesis

Abstract

With the growing demand for green chemicals, biological products and sustainable manufacturing, plant metabolic engineering has gradually become a vital direction for the development of high-value natural products. Plants possess photosynthetic autotrophic capacity, complex organelle structures and abundant endogenous metabolic networks, enabling them to synthesize and accumulate a variety of medicinal natural products, pigments and aromatic compounds. However, plant metabolic pathways are highly complex, characterized by pathway crosstalk, feedback regulation, compartmentalized distribution, isozyme redundancy and tissue specificity, which pose challenges to the targeted synthesis and yield improvement of target products. In recent years, the development of synthetic biology and gene editing technologies has provided new solutions for plant metabolic reconstruction. The combined optimization of modular elements and the CRISPR/Cas gene editing system can regulate the expression of target genes, improve the spatial distribution of enzymes, promote the transport of substrates and products, and reduce the shunting of metabolic flux by competitive pathways. Different chassis platforms such as tobacco, Arabidopsis thaliana , tomato, maize and plant cell suspension culture systems also provide diverse options for metabolic pathway analysis, functional verification and high-value product production. In the future, combined with multi-omics analysis, metabolic modeling, AI-aided design and systematic regulation strategies, plant metabolic engineering is expected to further break through limitations such as flux bottlenecks, unstable expression and product toxicity, and play a greater role in green manufacturing, biomedicine and bioeconomic development.