Production of cycloastragenol in metabolically engineered yeast

Abstract

Cycloastragenol is a bioactive, high-value triterpenoid derived from Astragalus membranaceus. Conventional plant-based extraction and chemical synthesis methods are expensive. To our knowledge, this is the first report on the de novo biosynthesis of cycloastragenol in yeast. The mevalonate pathway was reconstituted in yeast peroxisomes, and the engineered yeast produced 656.55 mg/L squalene. Further introduction of heterologous enzymes led the engineered yeast to produce 1.04 mg/L cycloastragenol, which demonstrated the yeast production of value-added medicinal molecules.

Keywords

Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Cycloastragenol / Mevalonate pathway / Synthetic biology / Metabolic engineering

Data Availability Statement

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and its supplementary information files or are available upon request.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jingxian Zhang: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Data curation. Peng Xu: Writing - review & editing. Yongjun Wei: Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Program for Scientific and Technological Innovation Talents in Universities of Henan Provincial Education Department (25HASTIT057), the Henan Province Outstanding Youth Foundation (242300421097), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (32371485 and 32111530179).

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