Background
Since the birth of synthetic biology in 2000, metabolic engineering has made increasingly huge progress on high value-added natural products. The synthesis and construction of metabolic pathways play a fundamental role in microbiology, biochemistry, and many other relevant fields. In 2003, Jay Keasling’s team reconstructed the biological synthesis pathway of arteannuinic acid in E. coli, providing functional confirmation for this metabolic process. In recent years, researchers have engineered yeast to produce a variety of plant-based natural products. These pathways are likely to involve the introduction of many heterologous genes and numerous genetic modifications to increase productivity. In the biosynthesis of opioids in yeast, 17 enzymes from different plants, animals, and yeasts were encoded through synthetic biological way. Although there are several tools for scientists to analyze and select the potential genes of the designed pathway, these tools all focus on the one or two specific gene instead of the whole metabolic system. Therefore, what our team’s trying to do is making comparisons between the designed pathway we want to synthesize and the natural-existing pathways to make sure that the researchers can get the whole picture. In this way, scientists can learn more about molecular functions and biological process from an innovating aspect.