Getting bacteria to do a plant’s job
Throughout human history, plants have been a source of potent medicines, including many cancer drugs discovered over the past few decades. However, it is quite difficult to discover such drugs and obtain them in large quantities from the plants or through chemical synthesis.MIT researchers and collaborators from Tufts University have now engineered E. coli bacteria to produce large quantities of a critical compound that is a precursor to the cancer drug Taxol, originally isolated from the bark of the Pacific yew tree. The bacteria can produce 1,000 times more of the precursor, known as taxadiene, than any other engineered microbial strain.The technique, described in the Oct. 1 issue of Science, could bring down the manufacturing costs of Taxol and also help scientists discover potential new drugs for cancer and other diseases such as hypertension and Alzheimer’s, said Gregory Stephanopoulos, who led the team of MIT and Tufts researchers and is...