By Roxanna Pignolet, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, ‘20

Author’s note: This literature review was originally written as an assignment for my 102B Writing in the Disciplines: Biological Sciences class. At the start of this quarter I was lucky enough to get involved in plant metabolic engineering research in Dr. Patrick Shih’s laboratory, which exposed me to the field of synthetic biology for the first time. I immediately became fascinated with the whole process of engineering plants to produce medically relevant compounds. Through this review I hope to inform others of these surprising and highly relevant applications of plant genetic engineering.

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