Terpene fragrance biosynthesis in tropical sandalwood

natacha.fontaine@sbf.ulaval.ca

Frais d'inscription: Site web: Conférentier: Contact: Tropical sandalwood (Santalum album) produces one of the world’s most highly prized fragrances. The fragrant sandalwood oil is extracted from the heartwood of mature trees. Historical overexploitation has threatened many natural populations of this slow growing, hemiparasitic plant. Two alternative systems to produce sandalwood fragrance include improved sandalwood plantation forestry and metabolically engineered, heterologous microbial or plant hosts. The development and optimization of both of these systems will benefit from genomics informed knowledge of sandalwood oil biosynthesis. Sandalwood oil contains four major fragrance-defining compounds, the sesquiterpene alcohols (Z)-α-santalol, (Z)-β-santalol, (Z)-epi-β-santalol and (Z)-α-exo-bergamotol. The first committed step in their biosynthesis is catalysed by a multiproduct terpene synthase, santalene/bergamotene synthase, which produces α-santalene, β-santalene, epi-β-santalene and α-exo-bergamotene. Formation of the corresponding sesquiterpene alcohols involves stereo-selective cytochrome P450 (P450) enzymes. Metabolite profiling and transcriptome analysis of plantation trees revealed a spatially unique heartwood transcriptome signature for sandalwood fragrance biosynthesis. In this project, we discovered the entire set of biosynthetic genes and enzymes of key components of sandalwood fragrance, which enabled alternative production systems for sandalwood oil fragrances. References: Celedon et al. (2016) The Plant Journal 86: 289-299 (doi: 10.1111/tpj.13162) Diaz-Chavez et al. (2013) PLOS ONE, 8(9): e75053 (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0075053) Jones et al. (2011) Journal of Biological Chemistry 286: 17445-17454 (doi/10.1074/jbc.M111.231787)
Natacha Fontaine
Joerg Bohlmann , professeur à l’Université de Colombie-Britanique
http://www.cef-cfr.ca/
Entrée libre.