Plant secondary metabolites like terpenoids and flavonoids are a large group of structurally diverse and versatile natural compounds used in a variety of applications, including pharmaceuticals, fragrances, flavours, food preservatives, and insecticides.  Only a tiny fraction of these can be commercially extracted from plants, and due to their low contents within the plants such commercial processes require unsustainable large-scale field cultivation. The goal for deCYPher is to make these compounds more accessible by creating an engineering pipeline that ensures the reliable and efficient development of their biotechnological manufacturing process.

The diversity of terpenoids and flavonoids stems from multiple variations on common molecule structures, which for a majority comes from oxygenation carried out by a vast family of enzymes called Cytochromes P450 (often dubbed CYPs). Terpenoids and flavonoids illustrate once more the complexity involved in biological processes and the difficulty of decoding and re-engineering them in a lab, not to mention at industrial and commercial scales.