Bioengineering is a new discipline of science that apply engineering principles and techniques on the biological process for development of valuable bioactive molecule, designing metabolites and changing cells or cellular metabolites to combat the current as well as future challenges and problem of mankind. This is one of the most challenging fields testing the researcher’s intelligence, dedication, skill and creativity and courage needed to contradict convention and cut new pathways through unexplored scientific terrain. Bioengineering has the potential to provide economical processes and methods for marketable and industrial production of commercially important metabolites. Bioengineering is fulfilling the requirement for the mass synthesis of bioactive compounds and valuable products that have applications in diverse fields. These diverse areas range from cutting down the cost of established processes, providing cost effective source material, utilization of agricultural waste in technologies with an aim of strategic fabrication of industrial procedure concerning to commercial production of these valuable biomolecules. Bioengineering is contributing to different processes with wider base and huge application areas, these diverse applications together with their latest development are mentioned in this review.
Bioactive compounds find applications as drug and food additives, agricultural products, beautifying formulation, medicinal, and biofuels. Apart from this, synthetic or designed molecules have been prepared with a health promoting influence. These valuable bioactive compounds include antioxidants like flavonoids, carotenoids and anthocyanins along with natural metabolites like terpene, alkaloids, stilbenes, glycosides, sterols and bio-peptides including sugar moiety bearing glycosides. Bioengineering aids in exploration, biosynthesis, extraction and enhancing biological activities of these molecules which make it one of the most exciting and challenging disciplines in bio-engineered biomolecules. Diverse sources like plants, sea-weeds, bacteria and fungi are utilized for the extraction and synthesis of these mentioned biological products. The extraction and isolation of biomolecules poses difficulties from its natural source for instance these are generally deposited in very low amounts in plants, the qualities and composition differ from, plant to plant, location to location and species to species. Moreover, the synthesis and accumulation of these biomolecules are dependent on age and developmental stage of plant. The chemical synthesis has drawbacks like high-cost, health harm requiring multiple purification steps. This development in genetic engineering has achieved a new milestone, yet employing improved microbes for extracting biomolecules of industrial importance is a preferred alternative. At present, numerous unique approaches for bioengineering of plants and microorganisms have been utilized for the synthesis of natural and synthetic molecules from renewable biomasses. Recent disciplines like developmental engineering, pathway engineering including systems biology and synthetic biology are speeding up the synthesis and the manufacturing of valuable biomolecules. This topic focuses on providing an overview of bioengineering for the bio-manufacturing of bioactive compounds.