PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Metabolism and Chemodiversity
This article is part of the Research TopicBiotechnological Approaches to Produce Specialized Metabolites in Medicinal Plants: In Vivo, in Vitro and in Silico StrategiesView all articles
Productive Chaos and Precision Engineering: Decoupling Discovery from Manufacturing to Revolutionize Plant-Inspired Therapeutics
Provisionally accepted
- 1Environmental Horticulture Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, United States
- 2Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, Rupnagar, India
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The pharmaceutical industry remains critically dependent on plant-derived natural products, yet the supply of these complex molecules is perpetually threatened by the inherent biological instability of plant systems. For decades, the field has struggled to force undifferentiated plant cell cultures into the mold of consistent industrial fermentation, a strategy largely defeated by epigenetic drift, somaclonal variation, and a linear cost structure that prohibits pharmaceutical scalability. This literature-based review articulates a fundamental paradigm shift: the strategic decoupling of discovery from production. It argues that the genomic plasticity of plant cells should not be suppressed but rather induced through stress elicitation to generate a "productive chaos" of chemical diversity for discovery. This expanded metabolic landscape is then decoded using single-cell multi-omics to identify elite producer cells, alongside advanced artificial intelligence and molecular networking to characterize novel bioactive candidates. Once identified, these pathways are repatriated into defined, heterologous microbial hosts, engineered via systems-level architectural optimization—including cofactor balancing and P450-reductase stoichiometry—for stable, high-titer manufacturing. By integrating techno-economic analysis, multi-omics, machine learning-guided strain optimization, and automated biofoundries, this "discovery-production decoupling" resolves the tension between biological complexity and industrial rigor. This framework transforms the economics of natural product supply, transitioning from the low-CAPEX/high-OPEX trap of extraction to the high-CAPEX/low-OPEX scalability of fermentation, offering a scientifically robust, commercially viable, and regulatory-compliant pathway to unlock the full therapeutic potential of the plant kingdom.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, biofoundries, cofactor balancing, Hairy root culture, Metabolic Engineering, microbial cell factories, P450 engineering, plant natural products
Received: 19 Dec 2025; Accepted: 23 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Mosoh. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Dexter Achu Mosoh
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.