All good things must come to an end... and apparently, all BAHD ones too! 😅
Check out our latest preprint on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks to the great team at @oconnorlab.bsky.social, @mpi-ce.bsky.social, and our collaborators at Uni York — couldn't have done it without you all!

Very pleased to announce that our manuscript describing @jgi.doe.gov 's Secondary Metabolism Collaboratory is now available! SMC has been up and active for a while now, but I'm really excited to start seeing more activity on here. Lots more to come.

doi.org/10.1093/nar/...

Our Taxol pathway preprint!
We developed a systematic strategy to activate and identify gene sets in plants. Used it to identify 8 genes in the Taxol pathway, enabling a 20-gene biosynthesis of a Taxol precursor.
Biggest surprise: a new protein that helps our oxidases produce the correct product

(2/2) We discovered that core eudicot use TSB-like a catalytically dead version of the tryptophan synthase beta-subunit (TSB) to highjack and fool tryptophan synthase alpha-subunit (TSA) into efficiently producing indole instead of tryptophan!

(1/2) Indole is a very important compound for plants to defend themselves 🛡️, attract pollinators 🐝, communicate with other plants 🌱 and produce natural products 🧪.

However, how the majority of plants produce it was unknown.

The working dead 🧟‍♀️: not just a metaphor for PhD students but also an enzymatic strategy!

If you are curious how a pseudoenzyme (aka the “dead” version of an enzyme) produces indole in plants 🌱check out our preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#PlantBiology#natprod @oconnorlab.bsky.social