The post-genomic era presents new opportunities for manipulating plant chemistry for improvement of plant traits such as disease and stress resistance and nutritional qualities. This conference will provide a setting for developing multidisciplinary collaborations needed to unravel the dynamic complexity of plant metabolic networks and advance basic and applied research in plant metabolic engineering. The conference will integrate recent advances in genomics, with metabolite and gene expression analyses. Research discussions will explore how biosynthetic pathways interact with regard to substrate competition and channeling, plasticity of biosynthetic enzymes, and investigate the localization, structure, and assembly of biosynthetic metabolons in native and nonnative environments. The meeting will develop new perspectives for plant transgenic research with regard to how transgene expression may influence cellular metabolism. Incorporation of spectroscopic approaches for metabolic profiling and flux analysis combined with mathematical modeling will contribute to the development of rational metabolic engineering strategies and lead to the development of new tools to assess temporal and subcellular changes in metabolite pools. The conference will also highlight new technologies for pathway engineering, including use of heterologous systems, directed enzyme evolution, engineering of transcription factors and application of molecular/genetic techniques for controlling biosynthetic pathways.