Plants can be used for the direct production of high value chemical products with genetic modification enabling or enhancing the production of the target molecule. Plants can also be substrates for organisms engineered to generate the product. Genetic improvement of the composition of plants may improve the efficiency of the processing. This processing may involve pre-treatment, enzyme digestion, biological processing (using microorganisms) and chemical modification. The relative value of these two approaches will be determined by the concentration of the compound that can be produced in the plant. New solvents have been developed to allow plant biomass to be more efficiently digested with enzymes and used as a source of sugars for bioconversion. Genetic modification of the plants may make this process more efficient or even eliminate the need for this pre-treatment processing step. Plants provide an essential resource for the replacement of fossil oil in the production of industrial chemicals, fuels, plastics and other biomaterials. Application of plant genomics and gene editing allow these processed to be made commercially viable.