HELIXPrep › Recombinant DNA Technology and Other Tools › Computational Tools
Module 6.4 · Topic 8
Module 6.4 · Topic 8
Every tool from this entire course, aimed at one final question
Growing a plant's own cells in tissue culture, back near the start of Section 5, was one way to get a valuable secondary metabolite without waiting on a slow-growing wild plant. There's a more ambitious version of the same idea — moving the genes for that entire biosynthetic pathway into a fast-growing microbe that never made that compound at all.
A valuable compound is naturally made by a slow-growing plant, through a multi-step pathway involving several enzymes. Could the genes for that entire pathway be identified, cloned, and installed into a fast-growing microbe that never produced this compound naturally?
Metabolic engineering, in its most ambitious form, involves:
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