Programmable Biosynthesis of Plant-Derived 4'-Deoxyflavone Glycosides by an Unconventional Yeast Consortium.

Previous data established 4'-deoxyflavone glycosides (4'-DFGs) as important pharmaceutical components in the roots of rare medical plants like Scutellaria baicalensis Georgi. Extracting these compounds from plants involves land occupation and is environmentally unfriendly. Therefore, a modular ("plug-and-play") yeast-consortium platform is developed to synthesize diverse 4'-DFGs de novo.

[Biosynthesis of natural products by non-conventional yeasts].

Non-conventional yeasts such as , , , and have proven to be efficient cell factories in producing a variety of natural products due to their wide substrate utilization spectrum, strong tolerance to environmental stresses and other merits. With the development of synthetic biology and gene editing technology, metabolic engineering tools and strategies for non-conventional yeasts are expanding. This review introduces the physiological characteristics, tool development and current application of several representative non-conventional yeasts, and summarizes the metabolic engineering strategies commonly used in the improvement of natural products biosynthesis.

Investigating Fungal Biosynthetic Pathways Using Pichia pastoris as a Heterologous Host.

Fungal natural products have extensive biological activities, and thus have been largely commercialized in the pharmaceutical, agricultural, and food industries. Recently, heterologous expression has become an irreplaceable technique to functionalize fungal biosynthetic gene clusters and synthesize fungal natural products in various chassis organisms. This chapter describes the general method of using Pichia pastoris as a chassis host to investigate fungal biosynthetic pathways.

Production of Plant 4'-Deoxyflavones Baicalein and Oroxylin A from Ethanol in Crabtree-Negative Yeast.

Baicalein and oroxylin A are well-known medicinal 4'-deoxyflavones found mainly in the roots of traditional medicinal plant Georgi. However, extraction from plants is time-consuming, environmentally unfriendly, and insufficient. Although microbial synthesis of flavonoids has been extensively reported, synthesis of downstream modified 4'-deoxyflavones has not, and their yields are extremely low.

Engineered ethanol-driven biosynthetic system for improving production of acetyl-CoA derived drugs in Crabtree-negative yeast.

Many natural drugs use acetyl-CoA as the key biosynthetic precursor. While in eukaryotic chassis host like yeast, efficient biosynthesis of these drugs is often hampered by insufficient acetyl-CoA supply because of its compartmentalized metabolism. Reported acetyl-CoA engineering commonly modifies central carbon metabolism to pull and push acetyl-CoA into cytosol from sugars or redirects biosynthetic pathways in organelles, involving complicated metabolic engineering strategies.