Molecular Breeding of Biosynthetic Pathways
As we know, biocatalysts or their recombined to develop new pathways for the synthesis of natural and novel metabolites. However, the diversity of pathways available in nature depends on the biosynthetic pathways that are available within the cells of diverse organisms, and this limits the compounds that can be synthesized in engineered organisms. Molecular breeding, however, involves breeding or developing new pathways, by matching and mixing genes, from different sources (even from unrelated metabolic routes). This creates new biosynthetic functions by (i) random mutagenesis, (ii) recombination and (iii) selection, but without any information on enzyme structure or catalytic mechanism involved in these pathways.