Advances and challenges in building microbial cell factories for phytohormone biomanufacturing toward sustainable agriculture.

Microbial cell factories can produce phytohormones at industrial scale, with advances in synthetic biology and AI enabling efficient, sustainable agriculture solutions.

• Why it matters: Conventional chemical pesticides pose environmental and safety risks, creating an urgent need for eco-friendly alternatives like phytohormones to improve crop resilience and reduce pollution.
• What they did: The review summarizes biosynthetic pathways and employs synthetic biology techniques—such as promoter, cofactor, transporter, and cytochrome P450 engineering—using microbial systems to produce key phytohormones.
• The result: These innovations facilitate scalable, sustainable production of phytohormones, with AI-driven optimization promising to overcome current challenges and revolutionize green pest management strategies.