BackgroundThe terpenoid indole alkaloid (TIA) pathway leads to the production of pharmaceutically important drugs, such as the anticancer compounds vinblastine and vincristine. Unfortunately, these drugs are produced in trace amounts, causing them to be very costly. To increase production of these drugs, an improved understanding of the TIA regulatory pathway is needed. Towards this end, transgenic Catharanthus roseus hairy roots that overexpress the ORCA2 TIA transcriptional activator were generated and characterized.ResultsTranscriptional profiling experiments revealed that overexpression of ORCA2 results in altered expression of key genes from the indole and terpenoid pathways, which produce precursors for the TIA pathway, and from the TIA pathway itself. In addition, metabolite-profiling experiments revealed that overexpression of ORCA2 significantly affects the levels of several TIA metabolites. ORCA2 overexpression also causes significant increases in transcript levels of several TIA regulators, including TIA transcriptional repressors.ConclusionsResults presented here indicate that ORCA2 plays a critical role in regulation of TIA metabolism. ORCA2 regulates expression of key genes from both feeder pathways, as well as the genes (STR and SGD) encoding the enzymes that catalyze the first two steps in TIA biosynthesis. ORCA2 may play an especially important role in regulation of the downstream branches of the TIA pathway, as it regulates four out of five genes characterized from this part of the pathway. Regulation of TIA transcriptional repressors by ORCA2 may provide a mechanism whereby increases in TIA metabolite levels in response to external stimuli are transient and limited in magnitude.

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Terpenoid indole alkaloid (TIA) biosynthesis in Catharanthus roseus is a complex and highly regulated process. Understanding the biochemistry and regulation of the TIA pathway is of particular interest as it may allow the engineering of plants to accumulate higher levels of pharmaceutically important alkaloids. Toward this end, we generated a transgenic C. roseus hairy root line that overexpresses the CrBPF1 transcriptional activator under the control of a β-estradiol inducible promoter. CrBPF1 is a MYB-like protein that was previously postulated to help regulate the expression of the TIA biosynthetic gene STR . However, the role of CrBPF1 in regulation of the TIA and related pathways had not been previously characterized. In this study, transcriptional profiling revealed that overexpression of CrBPF1 results in increased transcript levels for genes from both the indole and terpenoid biosynthetic pathways that provide precursors for TIA biosynthesis, as well as for genes in the TIA biosynthetic pathway. In addition, overexpression of CrBPF1 causes increases in the transcript levels for 11 out of 13 genes postulated to act as transcriptional regulators of genes from the TIA and TIA feeder pathways. Interestingly, overexpression of CrBPF1 causes increased transcript levels for both TIA transcriptional activators and repressors. Despite the fact that CrBPF1 overexpression affects transcript levels of a large percentage of TIA biosynthetic and regulatory genes, CrBPF1 overexpression has only very modest effects on the levels of the TIA metabolites analyzed. This finding may be due, at least in part, to the up-regulation of both transcriptional activators and repressors in response to CrBPF1 overexpression, suggesting that CrBPF1 may serve as a “fine-tune” regulator for TIA biosynthesis, acting to help regulate the timing and amplitude of TIA gene expression.

This review looks back on how the terpenoid indole alkaloid pathway and the regulatory factors in Catharanthus roseus were identified and characterized, and how metabolic engineering, including genetic engineering and metabolic profiling, was conducted based on the gained knowledge. In addition, further examination of the terpenoid indole alkaloid pathway is proposed.

Transgenic hairy root cultures have the potential to be an industrial production platform for a variety of chemicals. This report demonstrates the long-term stability of a transgenic Catharanthus roseus hairy root line containing the inducible expression of a feedback-insensitive anthranilate synthase (AS). After 5 years in liquid culture, the presence of the inserted AS gene was confirmed by genomic PCR. The inducible expression of AS was confirmed by enzyme assay and by changes in terpenoid indole alkaloid concentrations. This report also demonstrates that it may take as long as 2 years for the metabolite profile to stabilize.