Six enzymes from mayapple that complete the biosynthetic pathway to the etoposide aglycone

Abstract

Transplanting the wisdom of the mayapple Etoposide, a topoisomerase inhibitor, is used to treat various cancers. However, etoposide isn't that easy to get. Its precursor comes from the very slow-growing mayapple plant. Lau and Sattely used bioinformatics, heterologous enzyme expression, and kinetic characterization, to work out the pathway that makes the precursor in mayapple (see the Perspective by O'Connor). They then successfully transplanted the full biosynthetic pathway into tobacco plants. Science , this issue p. 1224 ; see also p. 1167