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Published on: April 19, 2011
Metabolic reprogramming of periwinkle plant culture
Weerawat Runguphan1, Sarah E O'Connor
1Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue 18-592, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Abstract:
We transformed an alkaloid biosynthetic gene with reengineered substrate specificity into Catharanthus roseus. The resulting transgenic plant cell culture produced a variety of unnatural alkaloid compounds when cocultured with simple, achiral, commercially available precursors that the reengineered enzyme was designed to accept. This work demonstrates the power of genetic engineering to retailor the structures of complex alkaloid natural products in plant culture.
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