Reconstitution of Early Paclitaxel Biosynthetic Network

Paclitaxel is an anticancer therapeutic produced by the yew tree. Over the last two decades, a significant bottleneck in the reconstitution of early paclitaxel biosynthesis has been the propensity of heterologously expressed pathway cytochromes P450, including taxadiene 5α-hydroxylase (T5αH), to form multiple products. This diverts metabolic flux away from the paclitaxel precursor, taxadien-5α-ol, thus previous attempts of reconstitution have not yielded sufficient material for characterization, regardless of the heterologous host. Here, we structurally characterized four new products of T5αH, many of which appear to be over-oxidation of the primary mono-oxidized products. By tuning the promoter strength for T5αH expression, levels of these proposed byproducts decrease with a concomitant increase in the accumulation of taxadien-5α-ol by four-fold. This engineered system enabled the reconstitution of a six step biosynthetic pathway to produce isolatable 5α,10β-diacetoxy-taxadien-13α-ol. Furthermore, we showed that this pathway may function as a metabolic network rather than a linear pathway. The engineering of the paclitaxel biosynthetic network demonstrates that Taxus genes can coordinatively function for the biosynthetic production of key early stage paclitaxel intermediates and serves as a crucial platform for the discovery of the remaining biosynthetic genes.