Construction of cell factories for production of lupeol in Saccharomyces cerevisiae / 中国中药杂志

ABSTRACT

Lupane-type triterpenoids, such as betulinic acid, are derived from lupeol and have excellent properties in anti-HIV, anti-cancer activities and so on. For realizing heterogenous production of lupane-type triterpenoids, our research firstly integrated all the seven genes in the MVA pathway in Saccharomyces cerevisiae to increase the supply of squalene (triterpenoids universal precursor) in a single step using the DNA assembler method. Next, cell factories for production of lupeol was constructed by integrating Arabidopsis thaliana lupeol synthetic gene (AtLUP) into chromosome of triterpenoid chassis strain. Results showed that the MVA pathway, about 20 kb nucleotide length, could be assembled in one-pot process and the doubled MVA pathway could significantly improve squalene by 500-fold, reaching 354.00 mg•L⁻¹. NK2-LUP was obtained by introducing AtLUP gene on chromosome, and could produce 8.23 mg•L⁻¹ lupeol. This study supports the possibility of large-scale biosynthetic pathway assembly in S.cerevisiae and lays the foundation of obtaining cell factories for production of lupan-type triterpenoids at the same time.