Creating pathways towards aromatic building blocks and fine chemicals

Aromatic compounds represent a broad class of chemicals with a range of industrial applications, all of which are conventionally derived from petroleum feedstocks. However, owing to a diversity of available pathway precursors along with natural and engineered enzyme 'parts', microbial cell factories can be engineered to create alternative, renewable routes to many of the same aromatic products. Drawing from the latest tools and strategies in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, such efforts are becoming an increasingly systematic practice, while continued efforts promise to open new doors to an ever-expanding range and diversity of renewable chemical and material products. This short review will highlight recent and notable achievements related for the microbial production of aromatic chemicals.