Metabolic Engineering: Issues and Prospects

Abstract

When we visit a florist's shop we are fascinated by the variety of flowers with different colors and fragrances.The rose, which has been one of the most beloved flowers, is now available in approximately 50,000 different colors. This enormous number of varieties was generated by traditional selection, mutation any hybridization methods. However, the blue rose, which has often been a theme of fairy tales, could not be made despite many efforts over the last 200 years. Recently,thanks to the development of recombinant DNA technology and advances in our understanding on the metabolic pathways for pigment biosynthesis, a true blue rose was made.Metabolic engineering has brought a fairy-tale subject into reality.