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Metabolic engineering

Biosensor keeps DOPA on track

Nature Chemical Biology volume 11, pages 450–451 (2015)Cite this article

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Biosensors are emerging as an important tool to evolutionarily engineer metabolic pathway enzymes for the microbial production of chemicals. A colorimetric biosensor used to increase dopamine levels in yeast now enables the production of benzylisoquinoline alkaloids from glucose.

Alkaloids are nitrogen-containing natural products that include analgesic, anticancer and antimalarial agents. Complex alkaloids are challenging synthetic targets, and it is often more cost effective to isolate commercial quantities from the native plants than to produce them using organic synthesis; such is the case with the anticancer agent vincristine and the analgesic morphine. Nevertheless, plants' long maturation times and low yields of secondary metabolites, as well as the difficulty of separating a specific alkaloid from other metabolites, often result in high prices and limited availability of alkaloid-derived therapeutics. Metabolic engineering offers an alternative approach to the production of complex alkaloids in which the expression of plant pathways in microbes turns these microorganisms into chemical factories. However, for engineered biosynthetic pathways to operate successfully, all of the necessary enzymatic machinery must work efficiently. Research from DeLoache et al.1 now describes a new strategy to search for improved enzymes and its successful application to a key enzyme in an alkaloid pathway.

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Figure 1: Biosensor-aided development of a tyrosine hydroxylase for the microbial production of BIAs from glucose.

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  1. Pamela Peralta-Yahya is in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.,

    Pamela Peralta-Yahya

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  1. Pamela Peralta-Yahya
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Correspondence to Pamela Peralta-Yahya.

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Peralta-Yahya, P. Biosensor keeps DOPA on track. Nat Chem Biol 11, 450–451 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.1830

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