MSU Technologies

Biosynthesis of Chemically Diversified Non-Natural Terpene Products

Executive Summary

Drug and chemical discovery is a lengthy, difficult, and inefficient process. The production of new drugs and chemicals is bottlenecked at synthesis or biosynthesis of complicated molecules, especially chiral molecules. Furthermore, diversification of current drug and chemical libraries is hindered by these difficult and inefficient synthetic processes.

Description of Technology

This technology diversifies and produces new terpene drugs and chemicals. This technology is composed of three parts: i) novel, non-natural enzyme substrates, ii) diterpene synthases that convert these substrates to intermediate scaffolds, and iii) the novel scaffolds. A diverse range of new intermediates (scaffolds) was made by introducing unnatural substrate molecules to a diverse panel of substrate-agnostic class I and II diterpene synthases. These scaffolds would otherwise be impossible to synthesize using typical chemical methods or through biosynthesis with natural substrate molecules. These scaffolds can be functionalized to make new or diverse drugs, fragrances, agrochemicals, antibacterial chemicals, etc. The diterpene synthases efficiently process the new substrates into new intermediate scaffolds. The pairing of both the novel, unnatural substrate molecules and the substrate-agnostic enzymes widens the scope in drug diversification and discovery and provides a biosynthetic library for activity screening.

Key Benefits

Simpler and faster method: produces many diverse compounds by processing novel substrates with diterpene synthase enzymes; enzymes accept many substrates

Applications