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Importation of taxadiene synthase into chloroplast improves taxadiene production in tobacco

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Main conclusion

Importation of taxadiene synthase into chloroplasts is important for the efficient heterologous production of taxadiene.

Abstract

Taxadiene, the first committed precursor to taxol, is synthesized from geranylgeranyl pyrophosphate (GGPP) by action of taxadiene synthase (TS). Heterologous production of taxadiene could potentially rely on both cytosolic mevalonic acid (MVA) pathway and the plastidic methylerythritol phosphate (MEP) pathway. We suggest the compartmentalized engineering in chloroplast as an efficient approach for taxadiene production. In this study, we directly introduced the TS gene from Taxus brevifolia into the tobacco chloroplast genome and found that the transplastomic plants accumulated a low content of taxadiene, ~ 5.6 μg/g dry weight (DW). Moreover, we tried a combination of MEP and MVA pathways for taxadiene synthesis by nuclear transformation with a truncated version of TS (without encoding a transit peptide) into the transplastomic plants. However, this did not further improve the taxadiene production. In contrast, we found that taxadiene could be produced up to 87.8 μg/g DW in leaves of transgenic plants expressing TS with a chloroplast transit peptide, which was significantly higher than that in leaves of transplastomic plants. Thus, this study highlights the importance of TS importation into chloroplast for production of taxadiene.

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Abbreviations

GGPP:

Geranylgeranyl pyrophosphate

MEP:

Methylerythritol phosphate pathway

MVA:

Mevalonic acid pathway

TS:

Taxadiene synthetase

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (Grant Number 2018CFB637) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number 31800223), both to LC.

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Author notes

  1. Jinqiu Fu and Wenbo Xu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Biocatalysis and Enzyme Engineering, School of Life Sciences, Hubei University, Wuhan, 430062, China

    Jinqiu Fu, Wenbo Xu, Wei Huang, Bipeng Wang, Shengchun Li, Jiang Zhang & Ling Chang

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  1. Jinqiu Fu
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  2. Wenbo Xu
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  3. Wei Huang
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  4. Bipeng Wang
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  7. Ling Chang
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Correspondence to Ling Chang.

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Fu, J., Xu, W., Huang, W. et al. Importation of taxadiene synthase into chloroplast improves taxadiene production in tobacco. Planta 253, 107 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00425-021-03626-z

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