Dae-Kyun Ro

TL;DR: The engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce high titres (up to 100 mg l-1) of artemisinic acid using an engineered mevalonate pathway, amorphadiene synthase, and a novel cytochrome P450 monooxygenase from A. annua that performs a three-step oxidation of amorpha-4,11-diene to art Artemisinic acid.

TL;DR: This work engineered the pyruvate dehydrogenase bypass in S. cerevisiae to enhance the supply of acetyl-CoA to the mevalonate pathway and achieve high-level production of amorphadiene and will be generally applicable to the production of a broad range of isoprenoids in yeast.

TL;DR: Two heterologous pathways for the biosynthesis of plant-derived terpenoid natural products are assembled, and the first examples of in vivo production of functionalized terpenoids in E. coli are presented using native plant P450s.

TL;DR: Characterization of a monoterpene synthase encoded by two identical, closely linked genes shows that divergence of organ expression pattern and product specificity are ongoing processes within the Arabidopsis TPS family.

TL;DR: A data-mining framework is established, employing next-generation sequencing and computational algorithms, to construct and analyze the transcriptomes of 75 non-model plants that produce compounds of interest for biotechnological applications and the selection of biosynthetic gene candidates associated with six specialized metabolic pathways is described.