The burgeoning demand for complex, biologically active molecules for medicine, materials science, consumer products, and agrochemicals is driving efforts to engineer new biosynthetic pathways into microorganisms and plants. We have applied principles of breeding, including mixing genes and modifying catalytic functions by in vitro evolution, to create new metabolic pathways for biosynthesis of natural products in Escherichia coli. We expressed shuffled phytoene desaturases in the context of a carotenoid biosynthetic pathway assembled from different bacterial species and screened the resulting library for novel carotenoids. One desaturase chimera efficiently introduced six rather than four double bonds into phytoene, to favor production of the fully conjugated carotenoid, 3, 4,3',4'-tetradehydrolycopene. This new pathway was extended with a second library of shuffled lycopene cyclases to produce a variety of colored products. One of the new pathways generates the cyclic carotenoid torulene, for the first time, in E. coli. This combined approach of rational pathway assembly and molecular breeding may allow the discovery and production, in simple laboratory organisms, of new compounds that are essentially inaccessible from natural sources or by synthetic chemistry.

Microorganisms and plants synthesize a diverse array of natural products, many of which have proven indispensable to human health and well-being. Although many thousands of these have been characterized, the space of possible natural products—those that could be made biosynthetically—remains largely unexplored. For decades, this space has largely been the domain of chemists, who have synthesized scores of natural product analogs and have found many with improved or novel functions. New natural products have also been made in recombinant organisms, via engineered biosynthetic pathways. Recently, methods inspired by natural evolution have begun to be applied to the search for new natural products. These methods force pathways to evolve in convenient laboratory organisms, where the products of new pathways can be identified and characterized in high-throughput screening programs. Carotenoid biosynthetic pathways have served as a convenient experimental system with which to demonstrate these ideas. Researchers have mixed, matched, and mutated carotenoid biosynthetic enzymes and screened libraries of these “evolved” pathways for the emergence of new carotenoid products. This has led to dozens of new pathway products not previously known to be made by the assembled enzymes. These new products include whole families of carotenoids built from backbones not found in nature. This review details the strategies and specific methods that have been employed to generate new carotenoid biosynthetic pathways in the laboratory. The potential application of laboratory evolution to other biosynthetic pathways is also discussed

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Successful feeding of the substrate geranylpyrophosphate (GPP) to monoterpene synthase is critical to the efficient microbial production of monoterpenes. Overexpression of GPP synthases, metabolic channeling from GPP synthase to terpene synthases, and down-tuning of endogenous competitors have been successfully used to increase the production of monoterpene. Nevertheless, the production of monoterpenes has remained considerably lower than that of hemi-/sesqui-terpenoids. We tested whether it is effective to improve the cellular activity of monoterpene synthases. To this end, we developed a high-throughput screening system to monitor for elevated GPP consumption. Through a single round of mutagenesis and screening, we isolated a pinene synthase variant that outperformed the wild-type (parent) enzyme in multiple contexts in Escherichia coli and cyanobacteria. The purified variant exhibited drastically altered metal dependency, enabling to keep the activity in the cytosol that is manganese-deficient. Coexpression of this variant with mevalonate pathway enzymes, isopentenylpyrophosphate isomerase, and GPP synthase yielded 140 mg/L pinene in a flask culture.