Due to volatile sugar prices, the food vs fuel debate, and recent increases in the supply of natural gas, methanol has emerged as a promising feedstock for the bio-based economy. However, attempts to engineer Escherichia coli to metabolize methanol have achieved limited success. Here, we provide a rigorous systematic analysis of several potential pathway bottlenecks. We show that regeneration of ribulose 5-phosphate in E. coli is insufficient to sustain methanol assimilation, and overcome this by activating the sedoheptulose bisphosphatase variant of the ribulose monophosphate pathway. By leveraging the kinetic isotope effect associated with deuterated methanol as a chemical probe, we further demonstrate that under these conditions overall pathway flux is kinetically limited by methanol dehydrogenase. Finally, we identify NADH as a potent kinetic inhibitor of this enzyme. These results provide direction for future engineering strategies to improve methanol utilization, and underscore the value of chemical biology methodologies in metabolic engineering.

The anticancer molecule taxol (Paclitaxel) stands as one of the most medically and economically important natural products. However, despite decades of extensive study, its biosynthesis remains poorly understood. Unpredictable behavior of the first oxygenation enzyme, taxadiene-5α-hydroxylase, which produces a range of undesired products, currently stands as a key bottleneck to improved taxol production. We herein present chemical and biological evidence of an unreported epoxidase activity of taxadiene-5α-hydroxylase that puts into question the previously proposed radical-rebound mechanism. We demonstrate that the poor selectivity of taxadiene-5α-hydroxylase arises from nonselective degradation of an epoxide intermediate produced via a selective oxidation step, rather than from promiscuous oxidation, as previously proposed. We support these conclusions by demonstrating variable enzyme behavior in differing hosts and conditions, similarity of products and product ratios generated from chemical epoxidation, and taxadiene-5α-hydroxylase, and differing enzymatic activity on alternative taxadiene isomers. Additionally, we use directed mutagenesis to describe the oxidizing species of the P450, demonstrate that further in vivo functionalization of oxidized taxadiene is unable to improve selectivity of the oxidation, and show that multiple products are produced in the Taxus cuspidata and are not simply an artifact of heterologous expression. Our results highlight an important, and previously unknown, obstacle to improved taxol production. We further offer insights to overcome the challenges posed by an epoxide-mediated reaction, which sets the basis for further engineering of taxol biosynthesis.

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In this perspective, we highlight recent examples and trends in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology that demonstrate the synthetic potential of enzyme and pathway engineering for natural product discovery. In doing so, we introduce natural paradigms of secondary metabolism whereby simple carbon substrates are combined into complex molecules through “scaffold diversification”, and subsequent “derivatization” of these scaffolds is used to synthesize distinct complex natural products. We provide examples in which modern pathway engineering efforts including combinatorial biosynthesis and biological retrosynthesis can be coupled to directed enzyme evolution and rational enzyme engineering to allow access to the “privileged” chemical space of natural products in industry-proven microbes. Finally, we forecast the potential to produce natural product-like discovery platforms in biological systems that are amenable to single-step discovery, validation, and synthesis for streamlined discovery and production of biologically active agents.

The 2C-methyl-d-erythritol-4-phosphate (MEP) pathway in Escherichia coli has been highlighted for its potential to provide access to myriad isoprenoid chemicals of industrial and therapeutic relevance and discover antibiotic targets to treat microbial human pathogens. Here, we describe a metabolic engineering strategy for the de novo construction of a biosynthetic pathway that produces 1-dexoxy-d-xylulose-5-phosphate (DXP), the precursor metabolite of the MEP pathway, from the simple and renewable starting materials d-arabinose and hydroxyacetone. Unlike most metabolic engineering efforts in which cell metabolism is reprogrammed with enzymes that are highly specific to their desired reaction, we highlight the promiscuous activity of the native E. coli fructose-6-phosphate aldolase as central to the metabolic rerouting of carbon to DXP. We use mass spectrometric isotopomer analysis of intracellular metabolites to show that the engineered pathway is able to support in vivo DXP biosynthesis in E. coli. The engineered DXP synthesis is further able to rescue cells that were chemically inhibited in their ability to produce DXP and to increase terpene titers in strains harboring the non-native lycopene pathway. In addition to providing an alternative metabolic pathway to produce isoprenoids, the results here highlight the potential role of pathway evolution to circumvent metabolic inhibitors in the development of microbial antibiotic resistance.