Discovery of New Bacterial Sesterterpene Synthases and Their Products

Daniel Icenhour, Jeffrey Rudolf

Department of Chemistry, University of Florida

While terpenes remain the largest family of natural products, their structural diversity is what sets them apart from other families of natural products and confers a vast array of different biological activities. Sesterterpenes, made up of C25 products, remains a relatively understudied subfamily that accounts for approximately 1,000 of the over 80,000 known terpenes, and even more staggering is that less than 25 of these compounds were isolated from bacteria (Rudolf et al., 2021). Here we describe a terpene production system in E. coli that we have developed to screen different bacterial sesterterpene synthases. We have identified several previously unreported terpene synthases capable of producing sesterterpenes and have started to work towards the characterization of their C25 products. Our work here will help to characterize new bacterial sesterterpene synthases, isolate and elucidate the structures of new and exciting sesterterpenes.