Microbial Cell Factories invites submissions to a collection featuring Microbial synthesis of natural products originating from medicinal plants and fungi. The medicinal and nutritional value of medicinal plants and fungi are generally represented by the accumulation of bioactive molecules that are in large part constituted by secondary metabolites with anti-cancer, hypoglycemic and antioxidant activities. The discovery of these biosynthetic pathways relies on the genomic and transcriptomic, metabolomic information. An omics strategy has been applied to accelerate the progress of pathway dissection for many important bioactive compounds, for example, ginsenoside, vinblastine, artemisinin and cannabinoids.
Bioactive compounds (terpenoids, flavonoids, and alkaloids) are gaining interest for nutrition and drug discovery. Such bioactive compounds are found at low concentration in their natural sources, so that dissecting their biosynthetic pathways is of value for their production through heterologous biosynthesis in engineered prokaryotic microbes and fungi, such as E. coli and yeast. To achieve microbial production at industrial scale, synthetic biology principles must be applied for improvement of productivity, titer and yield.
Potential topics should match Microbial Cell Factories requirements (see journal Aims and scope), and include but are not limited to the following
• Dissection of biosynthetic pathways of bioactive compounds using microbial hosts
• Pathway reconstitution in microbial hosts
• Enzyme engineering towards diversifying the product profile
• Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering strategies to improve the productivity of natural products in microbial hosts
Keywords: Natural products; Terpenoids; Flavonoids, Alkaloids; Biosynthesis; Synthetic Biology
How to submit
Authors are invited to submit original research and review articles (see submission guidelines) for possible inclusion in a special collection of this journal. Articles should be submitted to the journal using the online submission system. During submission, you should select the option to submit to a collection and choose " Microbial synthesis of natural products originating from medicinal plants and fungi” All submissions will undergo initial editorial triage and consideration for full peer review, as standard in the journal. Submission deadline November 30, 2022.
Guest Editors: Prof Mingfeng Cao, Xiamen University, Prof. Zheyong Xue, Northeast Forestry University, Prof. Jifeng Yuan, Xiamen University
