(439b) Characterizing Various Plant Stilbene Synthases to Engineer An Efficient Microbial Production Platform for Resveratrol

Polyphenols are increasingly under investigation since many molecules of this class are highly active in the human body, in fact recently, voluminous studies have shown that stilbenes possess vital health-improving activities mainly towards the prevention of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and even the potential to prevent aging. However, the development of robust industrial production platforms for these natural product-based therapeutics hinges on the selection of proficient protein sources and construction of optimal expressions platforms. In the present work, we investigated the recombinant expression of stilbene synthases under different promoter constructs and different Escherichia coli strains to create a recombinant bacterial strain capable of superior resveratrol titers in the g/L scale, sufficient for commercial usage. Further augmentation of intracellular malonyl-CoA, a major limiting factor for resveratrol production resulted in a 2.3g/L resveratrol production. Additionally, we report the investigation of various stilbene synthases from an array of plant species considering structure-activity relationships as well as expression efficiency in microorganisms and their relationship to resveratrol production.