Synthetic biology for sustainable food colourant production: Innovations and opportunities

Abstract

Natural healthy food colourants are increasingly demanded to replace synthetic ones which are linked to public health concerns. Although nature provides a rich palette of colours, producing food colourants from food crops or specific agricultural products can exacerbate food security issues and environmental challenges, such as deforestation driven by the expansion of farmland. Synthetic biology offers promising solutions to address the supply limitations of natural food colourants through developing colour-enriched plant varieties and particularly, high-yield microbial cell factories for production through precision fermentation. For the efficient translation of microbial fermentation solutions, it is important to integrate interdisciplinary synthetic/engineering biology research platforms, ranging from AI-assisted biological design to streamlined strain engineering workflows, and systems biology facilities, to address production challenges for scaling up. Bridging the lab-to-market gap through innovative economics and legality mechanism can accelerates the industrialisation of sustainable natural food colourants.

Keywords: Biotechnology; Metabolic engineering; Natural product; Polyphenols; Synthetic biology; Terpenoids.