Metabolic engineering of microorganisms for isoprenoid production

This 2008 article gives a nice (if somewhat dated, now) overview of isoprenoid engineering advances. In Dr. Williams course we recently looked at mevalonate pathway optimization for increased amorpha-4,11-diene production and I touched upon taxadiene production as well. Both drug precursors rely on isoprenoid engineering for useful semisynthetic production versus extraction from plants, which is costly, time consuming, and environmentally adverse (in the case of Taxol). Though not the thorough review of Keasling's work that Dr. Williams hopes that one of us turns up, this could serve as a starting point for further investigation of isoprenoid production in microbial hosts.