The Pathway Less Traveled: Engineering Biosynthesis of Nonstandard Functional Groups

The field of metabolic engineering has achieved biochemical routes for conversion of renewable inputs to structurally diverse chemicals, but these products contain a limited number of chemical functional groups. In this review, we provide an overview of the progression of uncommon or ‘nonstandard' functional groups from the elucidation of their biosynthetic machinery to the pathway optimization framework of metabolic engineering. We highlight exemplary efforts from primarily the last 5 years for biosynthesis of aldehyde, ester, terminal alkyne, terminal alkene, fluoro, epoxide, nitro, nitroso, nitrile, and hydrazine functional groups. These representative nonstandard functional groups vary in development stage and showcase the pipeline of chemical diversity that could soon appear within customized, biologically produced molecules.