Metabolic engineering of novel kavalactones using yeast quiescent cells

• Tomáš Pluskal Group – Biochemistry of Plant Specialized Metabolites (starts in May 2020)
• Tutor: Tomáš Pluskal

Metabolic engineering is a modern approach for the production of high-value molecules using enzymatic biosynthetic systems, typically expressed in microbes. One of the challenges in metabolic engineering is balancing the utilization of nutrients between cellular growth and the biosynthesis of the target molecules. The goal of this project is to explore the use of genetically- or environmentally-induced cellular quiescence in yeast as a platform for metabolic engineering that may enable redirecting all cellular resources into the expressed biosynthetic machinery and therefore generate much higher yields of target molecules. This new strategy will be demonstrated and optimized using the biosynthetic pathway of kavalactones, a class of psychoactive polyketides from the Polynesian herb kava, which has well-established anti-anxiety properties.

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• Pluskal, T. et al. The biosynthetic origin of psychoactive kavalactones in kava. Nat Plants 5, 867–878 (2019)

• Charles University, Faculty of Science