Global energy demand and environmental concerns have stimulated increasing efforts to produce carbon-neutral fuels directly from renewable resources. Microbially derived aliphatic hydrocarbons, the petroleum-replica fuels, have emerged as promising alternatives to meet this goal. However, engineering metabolic pathways with high productivity and yield requires dynamic redistribution of cellular resources and optimal control of pathway expression. Here we report a genetically encoded metabolic switch that enables dynamic regulation of fatty acids (FA) biosynthesis in Escherichia coli. The engineered strains were able to dynamically compensate the critical enzymes involved in the supply and consumption of malonyl-CoA and efficiently redirect carbon flux toward FA biosynthesis. Implementation of this metabolic control resulted in an oscillatory malonyl-CoA pattern and a balanced metabolism between cell growth and product formation, yielding 15.7-and 2.1-fold improvement in FA titer compared with the wild-type strain and the strain carrying the uncontrolled metabolic pathway. This study provides a new paradigm in metabolic engineering to control and optimize metabolic pathways facilitating the high-yield production of other malonyl-CoA-derived compounds.biofuels | dynamic metabolic control | transcriptional regulation A grand challenge in synthetic biology is to move the design of biomolecular circuits from purely genetic constructs toward systems that integrate different levels of cellular complexity, including regulatory networks and metabolic pathways (1). Despite the fact that a large volume of regulatory architectures and motifs has been discovered (2, 3), little has been accomplished in pathway engineering to improve cellular productivity and yield by exploiting dynamic pathway regulation and metabolic control (4). One essential part in implementing synthetic metabolic control in pathway engineering is to engineer novel metabolite sensors with desired input-output relationships. For example, have designed and applied a regulatory circuit that can sense the glycolytic pathway hallmark metabolite acetylphosphate to control the lycopene biosynthetic pathway (5) and generate oscillatory gene expression (6) as well as achieve artificial cell-cell communication (7). Dahl et al. (8) have used stressresponse promoters to improve farnesyl pyrophosphate production, and Tsao et al. (9) have rewired the Escherichia coli native quorumsensing regulon for autonomous induction of recombinant proteins.Traditional metabolic engineering is largely focused on the overexpression of rate-limiting steps (10