Many of the drugs we use are natural compounds or their derivatives, obtained from plants, fungi, or bacteria. Unfortunately, these organisms produce them for their own needs, and don’t always make enough for us to obtain them in sufficient bulk or purity. One of the things that motivates the field of synthetic biology is the hope that we can design an organism from scratch so that it will make useful compounds like these drugs. But a paper that will be released by PNAS later this week suggests that there may be an easier way to go about things: take an existing bacteria and delete anything it doesn’t need to make the drugs.
One of the challenges of engineering bacteria to produce natural compounds is that the chemicals involved in the production process—the biosynthetic pathway, as it’s called—may come from many different parts of a cell’s metabolism. So, for example, the biosynthetic pathway may stitch together a piece of a sugar, part of a broken-down protein, and some lipid in order to make a useful drug compound. So, it’s not simply enough to identify the enzymes that catalyze the steps in a biosynthetic pathway; you have to identify the raw materials, too, and ensure that your engineered bacteria makes all of those.
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