Weerawat Runguphan

TL;DR: This work engineered the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce fatty acid-derived biofuels and chemicals from simple sugars and envision that this approach will provide a scalable, controllable and economic route to this important class of chemicals.

TL;DR: It is reported that chlorination biosynthetic machinery from soil bacteria can be successfully introduced into the medicinal plant Catharanthus roseus (Madagascar periwinkle) and is incorporated in a predictable and regioselective manner onto the plant alkaloid products.

TL;DR: This work engineered Pichia pastoris, an industrial workhorse in heterologous enzyme production, to produce the biofuel isobutanol from two renewable carbon sources, glucose and glycerol, and exploited the yeast’s amino acid biosynthetic pathway and diverted the amino acid intermediates to the 2-keto acid degradation pathway for higher alcohol production.

TL;DR: Large-scale transcriptome sequence and expression profiles for three species of Asterids that produce medicinally important MIAs are generated, providing a rich resource for understanding plant specialized metabolism, and promotes realization of innovative production systems for plant-derived pharmaceuticals.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the opportunities and challenges of implementing metabolic engineering in various platforms for the synthesis of natural and unnatural plant alkaloids for large-scale drug development.