Polyphenols are secondary metabolites isolated from plants that can be divided into flavonoids,
stilbenoids, curcuminoids, coumarins, polyphenolic amides and lignans. These exhibit diverse
biological and potential therapeutic activities including antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and
anticancer, among others. Despite all this potential, extracting polyphenols from plants is not
straightforward given the low yields of the process. The extracted amounts are not sufficient to
respond to the increasing demand for polyphenols, the process is expensive and unfriendly for
the environment. Hence, developing microbial cell factories to effectively produce polyphenols
arises as an attractive way to address the mentioned limitations and produce high amounts of
these compounds. Advances in the metabolic engineering and synthetic biology fields have
been key in the design of efficient and robust microbial cell factories, mainly due to the
development of proper molecular biology tools, as well as to the unravelling of new enzymes
in plants or other organisms to better engineer such heterologous pathways. Several hosts
have been explored as potential polyphenols microbial cell factories. However, there is still a
long way before this production at an industrial scale can become a reality. The perspectives
and current challenges resulting from these developments will be discussed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
