Plant bio-factories as a sustainable source of high-value compounds

Engineering plant bio-factories as a sustainable source of high-value compounds Plants have played a vital role in human history providing us with food and medicine. Even nowadays, some of the most efficient treatments against certain diseases are obtained from plant extracts. However, the natural low yield of these compounds presents a challenge for their widespread use. Thanks to recent advances in plant synthetic biology, we can now turn plants into bio-factories, enhancing the accumulation of natural compounds or even producing new-to-nature molecules, such as human vaccines. Plant bio-factories have several advantages over classical bacterial or yeast bioreactors. Perhaps the most important is their scalability potential as they are autotrophic and they do not require sterile conditions for their growth in the open field. Plants possess specialized organs for the production and secretion of specialized metabolites, such as flowers, roots or trichomes, that facilitate the p