A Recent Update on Metabolic Engineering in Plants, Its Futuristic Applications with Special Inference to Sugarcane Value Addition

Metabolic engineering is an emerging technology that manipulates the metabolic pathways of different organisms to improve the production of the metabolites of our interest. Although many studies have been reported for metabolic engineering in plants, modifying the plant metabolic pathways is difficult due to their complexity and compartmentalization. A maximum number of metabolites must be profiled using different metabolic profiling techniques to better understand the entire metabolites and their pathways. Primary and secondary metabolites of importance are engineered in plants according to the need. Mainly secondary metabolites are targeted as they are not directly involved in the growth and development of plants. Primary plant metabolic engineering can be performed only after a thorough study of the metabolic pathways involved and their network and flux analysis. The metabolic engineering of primary metabolites resulting in stunted growth and development of plants has been reported in many studies. The plant metabolic pathways are highly interconnected and compartmentalized which needs to be carefully untangled and studied in detail for each step of metabolic alteration. Moreover, growing plants and study of metabolic engineering at a particular development stage are tedious and time-consuming. Different strategies, methods, tools, challenges, and applications of plant metabolic engineering are discussed in this review along with a few examples of experiments conducted in manipulating primary metabolic pathways. Sugarcane is a cash crop belonging to the Poaceae family cultivated worldwide for different products, mainly sucrose. It is a highly polyploid plant species with a complex genetic makeup, making it a tough crop for genetic and metabolic manipulation. Few metabolic engineering experiments are conducted in sugarcane with encouraging results as a result of metabolic alteration.