James B. Y. H. Behrendorff

Directed evolution of cytochrome P450 enzymes for biocatalysis: exploiting the catalytic versatility of enzymes with relaxed substrate specificity.

Cytochrome P450 enzymes are renowned for their ability to insert oxygen into an enormous variety of compounds with a high degree of chemo- and regio-selectivity under mild conditions. This property has been exploited in Nature for an enormous variety of physiological functions, and representatives of this ancient enzyme family have been identified in all kingdoms of life. The catalytic versatility of P450s makes them well suited for repurposing for the synthesis of fine chemicals such as drugs. Although these enzymes have not evolved in Nature to perform the reactions required for modern chemical industries, many P450s show relaxed substrate specificity and exhibit some degree of activity towards non-natural substrates of relevance to applications such as drug development. Directed evolution and other protein engineering methods can be used to improve upon this low level of activity and convert these promiscuous generalist enzymes into specialists capable of mediating reactions of interest with exquisite regio- and stereo-selectivity. Although there are some notable successes in exploiting P450s from natural sources in metabolic engineering, and P450s have been proven repeatedly to be excellent material for engineering, there are few examples to date of practical application of engineered P450s. The purpose of the present review is to illustrate the progress that has been made in altering properties of P450s such as substrate range, cofactor preference and stability, and outline some of the remaining challenges that must be overcome for industrial application of these powerful biocatalysts.

Is the undergraduate research experience (URE) always best?: The power of choice in a bifurcated practical stream for a large introductory biochemistry class

Science undergraduate courses typically cater to a mixed‐learner cohort, with a diversity of motivations and skills. This diversity introduces pressure for designers of the practical laboratory curriculum. Students who are struggling with the course need a series of tasks that begin simply, and transition to more conceptually difficult material. More capable students need opportunities for conceptual extension and creative activity. In this report, we examine an approach we have used to address this problem in the context of a large introductory biochemistry undergraduate class. Rather than attempting to compromise on a single practical series for our 470 students, we devised two parallel but equivalent practical streams and offered students their choice of laboratory experience. One stream (called Laboratory Experience for Acquiring Practical Skills) was designed to allow acquisition of a range of common biochemistry and molecular biology laboratory skills. The other (called Active Learning Laboratory Undergraduate Research Experience) was designed to offer an authentic (but scaffolded) undergraduate research project. We discuss the ramifications and implications of our approach in terms of funding, staffing, and assessment while also examining student motivation, satisfaction, and skills acquisition. We present data supporting the practical and pedagogical value of laboratory exercise streaming to meet the diverse needs of students. We suggest a framework that can be used to pre‐emptively identify and address problems associated with a bifurcated practical series and increase the sustainability of the approach.

Facile production of minor metabolites for drug development using a CYP3A shuffled library

Metabolic profiling of new drugs is limited by the difficulty in obtaining sufficient quantities of minor metabolites for definitive structural identification. Biocatalytic methods offer the potential to produce metabolites that are difficult to synthesize by traditional medicinal chemistry. We hypothesized that the regioselectivity of the drug metabolizing cytochrome P450s could be altered by directed evolution to produce minor metabolites of drugs in development. A biocatalyst library was constructed by DNA shuffling of four CYP3A forms. The library contained 11 ± 4 (mean ± SD) recombinations and 1 ± 1 spontaneous mutations per mutant. On expression in Escherichia coli, 96% of mutants showed detectable activity to at least one probe substrate. Using testosterone as a model drug-like substrate, mutants were found that preferentially formed metabolites produced in only trace amounts by parental forms. A single 1.6L batch culture of one such mutant enabled the facile isolation of 0.3mg of the minor metabolite 1β-hydroxytestosterone and its ab initio structural determination by 1D- and 2D-NMR spectroscopy.

Arginine deiminase pathway provides ATP and boosts growth of the gas-fermenting acetogen Clostridium autoethanogenum

Acetogens are attractive organisms for the production of chemicals and fuels from inexpensive and non-food feedstocks such as syngas (CO, CO2 and H2). Expanding their product spectrum beyond native compounds is dictated by energetics, particularly ATP availability. Acetogens have evolved sophisticated strategies to conserve energy from reduction potential differences between major redox couples, however, this coupling is sensitive to small changes in thermodynamic equilibria. To accelerate the development of strains for energy-intensive products from gases, we used a genome-scale metabolic model (GEM) to explore alternative ATP-generating pathways in the gas-fermenting acetogen Clostridium autoethanogenum. Shadow price analysis revealed a preference of C. autoethanogenum for nine amino acids. This prediction was experimentally confirmed under heterotrophic conditions. Subsequent in silico simulations identified arginine (ARG) as a key enhancer for growth. Predictions were experimentally validated, and faster growth was measured in media containing ARG (tD~4h) compared to growth on yeast extract (tD~9h). The growth-boosting effect of ARG was confirmed during autotrophic growth. Metabolic modelling and experiments showed that acetate production is nearly abolished and fast growth is realised by a three-fold increase in ATP production through the arginine deiminase (ADI) pathway. The involvement of the ADI pathway was confirmed by metabolomics and RNA-sequencing which revealed a ~500-fold up-regulation of the ADI pathway with an unexpected down-regulation of the Wood-Ljungdahl pathway. The data presented here offer a potential route for supplying cells with ATP, while demonstrating the usefulness of metabolic modelling for the discovery of native pathways for stimulating growth or enhancing energy availability.

Systems analysis of methylerythritol-phosphate pathway flux in E. coli: insights into the role of oxidative stress and the validity of lycopene as an isoprenoid reporter metabolite

BackgroundHigh-throughput screening methods assume that the output measured is representative of changes in metabolic flux toward the desired product and is not affected by secondary phenotypes. However, metabolic engineering can result in unintended phenotypes that may go unnoticed in initial screening. The red pigment lycopene, a carotenoid with antioxidant properties, has been used as a reporter of isoprenoid pathway flux in metabolic engineering for over a decade. Lycopene production is known to vary between wild-type Escherichia coli hosts, but the reasons behind this variation have never been fully elucidated.ResultsIn an examination of six E. coli strains we observed that strains also differ in their capacity for increased lycopene production in response to metabolic engineering. A combination of genetic complementation, quantitative SWATH proteomics, and biochemical analysis in closely-related strains was used to examine the mechanistic reasons for variation in lycopene accumulation. This study revealed that rpoS, a gene previously identified in lycopene production association studies, exerts its effect on lycopene accumulation not through modulation of pathway flux, but through alteration of cellular oxidative status. Specifically, absence of rpoS results in increased accumulation of reactive oxygen species during late log and stationary phases. This change in cellular redox has no effect on isoprenoid pathway flux, despite the presence of oxygen-sensitive iron-sulphur cluster enzymes and the heavy redox requirements of the methylerythritol phosphate pathway. Instead, decreased cellular lycopene in the ΔrpoS strain is caused by degradation of lycopene in the presence of excess reactive oxygen species.ConclusionsOur results demonstrate that lycopene is not a reliable indicator of isoprenoid pathway flux in the presence of oxidative stress, and suggest that caution should be exercised when using lycopene as a screening tool in genome-wide metabolic engineering studies. More extensive use of systems biology for strain analysis will help elucidate such unpredictable side-effects in metabolic engineering projects.

Production of industrially-relevant isoprenoid compounds in engineered microbes

Isoprenoids are the largest class of natural compounds and have extremely diverse chemical and functional properties. They are involved in many different cellular processes, including hormonal regulation, signalling, pest/pathogen defence and redox status. They also provide many of the colours, flavours and aromas found in biology. The diversity of isoprenoids lends them to a wide variety of biotechnological applications, both by exploiting their myriad natural functions and by using them as industrial chemicals/chemical feedstocks. These applications range from fine chemicals (pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, antimicrobials) through mid-volume (flavours, fragrances, colourants, fuel additives) and bulk (fuels, synthetic polymers, agricultural chemicals, etc.) products. However, in their natural context, individual isoprenoids are not usually found at sufficient abundance for industrial use. Moreover, extraction and/or purification may be difficult and/or expensive, or production may be highly variable, making industrial production processes challenging or impossible. Artificial synthesis is often not possible due to complexity, expense or other chemical properties/requirements. Consequently, there is a strong movement towards bioengineering of microbes for production of these valuable compounds in controlled fermentation conditions. Here we consider the requirements for developing economically viable isoprenoid production bioprocesses as well as the current state of the art in engineering production in microbes. We also discuss some of the challenges we face in bringing these technologies to the market.

Directed evolution reveals requisite sequence elements in the functional expression of P450 2F1 in Escherichia coli

Cytochrome P450 2F1 (P450 2F1) is expressed exclusively in the human respiratory tract and is implicated in 3-methylindole (3MI)-induced pneumotoxicity via dehydrogenation of 3MI to a reactive electrophilic intermediate, 3-methyleneindolenine (3-MEI). Studies of P450 2F1 to date have been limited by the failure to express this enzyme in Escherichia coli. By contrast, P450 2F3, a caprine homologue that shares 84% sequence identity with P450 2F1 (86 amino acid differences), has been expressed in E. coli at yields greater than 250 nmol/L culture. We hypothesized that a limited number of sequence differences between P450s 2F1 and 2F3 could limit P450 2F1 expression in E. coli and that problematic P450 2F1 sequence elements could be identified by directed evolution. A library of P450 2F1/2F3 mutants was created by DNA family shuffling and screened for expression in E. coli. Three generations of DNA shuffling revealed a mutant (named JH_2F_F3_1_007) with 96.5% nucleotide sequence identity to P450 2F1 and which expressed 119 ± 40 pmol (n = 3, mean ± SD) hemoprotein in 1 mL microaerobic cultures. Across all three generations, two regions were observed where P450 2F3-derived sequence was consistently substituted for P450 2F1 sequence in expressing mutants, encoding nine amino acid differences between P450s 2F1 and 2F3: nucleotides 191-278 (amino acids 65-92) and 794-924 (amino acids 265-305). Chimeras constructed to specifically test the importance of these two regions confirmed that P450 2F3 sequence is essential in both regions for expression in E. coli but that other non-P450 2F1 sequence elements outside of these regions also improved the expression of mutant JH_2F_F3_1_007. Mutant JH_2F_F3_1_007 catalyzed the dehydrogenation of 3MI to 3-MEI as indicated by the observation of glutathione adducts after incubation in the presence of glutathione. The JH_2F_F3_1_007 protein differs from P450 2F1 at only 20 amino acids and should facilitate further studies of the structure-activity relationships of P450s of the 2F subfamily.

Restriction Enzyme-Mediated DNA Family Shuffling

DNA shuffling is an established recombinatorial method that was originally developed to increase the speed of directed evolution experiments beyond what could be accomplished using error-prone PCR alone. To achieve this, mutated copies of a protein-coding sequence are fragmented with DNase I and the fragments are then reassembled in a PCR without primers. The fragments anneal where there is sufficient sequence identity, resulting in full-length variants of the original gene that have inherited mutations from multiple templates. Subsequent studies demonstrated that directed evolution could be further accelerated by shuffling similar native protein-coding sequences from the same gene family, rather than mutated variants of a single gene. Generally at least 65-75 % global identity between parental sequences is required in DNA family shuffling, with recombination mostly occurring at sites with at least five consecutive nucleotides of local identity. Since DNA shuffling was originally developed, many variations on the method have been published. In particular, the use of restriction enzymes in the fragmentation step allows for greater customization of fragment lengths than DNase I digestion and avoids the risk that parental sequences may be over-digested into unusable very small fragments. Restriction enzyme-mediated fragmentation also reduces the occurrence of undigested parental sequences that would otherwise reduce the number of unique variants in the resulting library. In the current chapter, we provide a brief overview of the alternative methods currently available for DNA shuffling as well as a protocol presented here that improves on several previous implementations of restriction enzyme-mediated DNA family shuffling, in particular with regard to purification of DNA fragments for reassembly.

DNA Shuffling of Cytochrome P450 Enzymes

DNA family shuffling is an efficient method for creating libraries of novel enzymes, in which a high proportion of mutants exhibit correct folding and possess catalytic properties distinct from the starting material. The evolutionary arrangement of cytochromes P450 into subfamilies of enzymes with highly similar nucleotide sequences but distinct catalytic properties renders them excellent starting material for DNA family shuffling experiments. This chapter provides a general method for creating libraries of shuffled P450s from two or more related sequences and incorporates several recent improvements to previously published methods.

Non-photosynthetic plastids as hosts for metabolic engineering

Using plants as hosts for production of complex, high-value compounds and therapeutic proteins has gained increasing momentum over the past decade. Recent advances in metabolic engineering techniques using synthetic biology have set the stage for production yields to become economically attractive, but more refined design strategies are required to increase product yields without compromising development and growth of the host system. The ability of plant cells to differentiate into various tissues in combination with a high level of cellular compartmentalization represents so far the most unexploited plant-specific resource. Plant cells contain organelles called plastids that retain their own genome, harbour unique biosynthetic pathways and differentiate into distinct plastid types upon environmental and developmental cues. Chloroplasts, the plastid type hosting the photosynthetic processes in green tissues, have proven to be suitable for high yield protein and bio-compound production. Unfortunately, chloroplast manipulation often affects photosynthetic efficiency and therefore plant fitness. In this respect, plastids of non-photosynthetic tissues, which have focused metabolisms for synthesis and storage of particular classes of compounds, might prove more suitable for engineering the production and storage of non-native metabolites without affecting plant fitness. This review provides the current state of knowledge on the molecular mechanisms involved in plastid differentiation and focuses on non-photosynthetic plastids as alternative biotechnological platforms for metabolic engineering.