ABSTRACT
Plant-derived aromatic natural products have important medicinal value and can be made into pharmaceutical and healthcare products with antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, analgesic, anti-oxidative, insecticidal and anthelmintic, expectorant and cough suppressant, tranquilizer and antitumor effects. However, the low content of aromatic natural products in plants and the difficulty and high costs in extraction and purification hampered its large-scale production and application. Recent advances in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering have enabled the tailor-made production of aromatic natural products using engineered microbial cell factories. This review summarizes the categories, the synthetic pathways, the key enzymes and the synthetic biology strategies for production of aromatic natural products, and discusses the challenges and opportunities in this area.