THE BAKERIAN-LECTURE, 1996 - GENETICALLY-ENGINEERED SYNTHESIS OF NATURAL-PRODUCTS

Since many natural products are of biological and medicinal importance , methods for studying their biosynthetic pathways, which may eventual ly result in increased production or novel compounds, are continually being sought.Advances in genetic engineering have made possible the ho mologous or heterologous expression of many natural product biosynthet ic genes from divergent sources resulting in a supply of enzymes not r eadily available by isolation from the producing organism. Mixing and matching of these enzymes in cell-free reactions provides information about enzyme mechanisms and pathway intermediates, which can be used t a design the total cell-free, multi-enzyme synthesis of the target mol ecule.