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How the flame lily synthesizes a therapeutic natural product

The discovery of the biosynthetic pathway for colchicine, a medicine produced by plants, holds promise for the use of metabolic-engineering approaches in producing reliably high yields of this compound.
  1. Jing-Ke Weng

    1. Jing-Ke Weng is at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA.

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Writing in Nature, Nett et al.1 shed light on how colchicine, a pharmaceutically and scientifically useful natural product, is biosynthesized in the flame lily Gloriosa superba. The authors identify eight G. superba genes that encode a series of specialized metabolic enzymes, which collectively convert 1-phenethylisoquinoline, a compound produced early in the biosynthetic pathway, to N-formyldemecolcine, the first colchicine precursor that harbours the natural product’s signature molecular scaffold. The study not only reveals the ingenuity of plant biosynthesis, but also opens the way to the development of metabolically engineered organisms that make colchicine more efficiently than do its natural producers.

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Nature 584, 49-50 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01675-0

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Competing Interests

The author is a co-founder, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board, and a shareholder of DoubleRainbow Biosciences, which develops biotechnologies related to natural products.

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