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Plants produce a variety of natural products with promising biological activities, such as the phenylpropanoids resveratrol and curcumin. While these molecules are naturally assembled through dedicated plant metabolic pathways, combinatorial biosynthesis has become an attractive tool to generate desired molecules. In this work, we demonstrated that biosynthetic enzymes from different sources can be recombined like legos to make various molecules. Seven biosynthetic genes from plants and bacteria were used to establish a variety of complete biosynthetic pathways in Escherichia coli to make valuable compounds. Different combinations of these biosynthetic bricks were made to design rationally various natural product pathways, yielding four phenylpropanoid acids (cinnamic acid, p-coumaric acid, caffeic acid, and ferulic acid), three bioactive natural stilbenoids (resveratrol, piceatannol and pinosylvin), and …