ENGINEERING SACCHAROMYCES CEREVISIAE AS A PLATFORM FOR DIVERSE COUMARIN BIOSYNTHESIS
ABSTRACT Plant natural products are secondary metabolites synthesized in the plant with great pharmaceutical, nutritional, or agricultural uses. Specifically, coumarins are a valuable family of phenylpropanoids that are essential and widely distributed in plants. They have exhibited a vast array of pharmaceutical values, such as antioxidant, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-depressant. In addition, coumarins have been commonly used in cosmetics, perfumes, beverages, food and tobaccos industries. Despite the extensive applications of coumarins and their derivatives, current research of them is very limited, which hinders the synthesis of coumarins. Here, we report the reconstruction of a coumarin biosynthetic pathway in Saccharomyces cerevisiae to enable the synthesis of diverse coumarins. Feeding caffeic acid to our engineered S. cerevisiae strain yielded a representative coumarin, scopoletin. This study paves the way to the biomanufacturing of more diverse coumarin compounds in engineered microbes.