Metabolic engineering: an effective approach for optimal production of secondary metabolite compounds

Plants have a limited capacity to produce secondary metabolites in natural environmental conditions; however, recent developments in genetic engineering and recombinant DNA technology have had a great impact on their production. Metabolic engineering is considered as an efficient tool towards achieving higher level of the secondary metabolites. Globally, metabolite engineering is widely used for increasing the content of secondary metabolites or even producing novel medicinal compounds. Iran has a high level of genetic and phytochemical variability for different types of medicinal plants. Knowing the biochemical pathways and manipulating these native plants improve their commercial production. Consequently, our research group has started large-scale experiments on native medicinal plants such as different species of genus Artemisia, Cannabis, Papaver, and Salvia. We aim to increase and/or decrease and change metabolites by using anti-sense and RNAi technologies, isolation and transformation of related genes, promoter analysis and changes in regulatory gene expression. Such studies would definitely provide a great chance to improve the production of secondary metabolites in these plants and to better understand the novel genes involve in bio-synthetic pathways.