Abstract: Metabolic engineering is an approach to understanding and utilizing metabolic processes, by which metabolic networks and gene regulatory networks can be optimized or directly modified to enhance metabolites production or synthesize novel compounds.Development of systems biology and functional genomics in post-genomic era provides significant opportunities to construct microbial cell factories for metabolic engineering.The recent development of metabolic engineering in technology and application was reviewed, based on which several key issues were addressed and future perspectives were discussed.Finally, the strategy to develop metabolic engineering in China was proposed.