When Carotenoid Biosynthesis Genes Met Escherichia coli : The Early Days and These Days

Nowadays, carotenoid biosynthetic pathways are sufficiently elucidated at gene levels in bacteria, fungi, and higher plants. Also, in pathway engineering for isoprenoid (terpene) production, carotenoids have been one of the most studied targets. However, in 1988 when the author started carotenoid research, almost no carotenoid biosynthesis genes were identified. It was because carotenogenic enzymes are easily inactivated when extracted from their organism sources, indicating that their purification and the subsequent cloning of the corresponding genes were infeasible or difficult. On the other hand, natural product chemistry of carotenoids had advanced a great deal. Thus, those days, carotenoid biosynthetic pathways had been proposed based mainly on the chemical structures of carotenoids without findings on relevant enzymes and genes. This chapter shows what happened on carotenoid research, when carotenoid biosynthesis genes met non-carotenogenic Escherichia coli around 1990, followed by subsequent developments.