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Department of Pharmacology

 
Author(s): 
Shaw, WM, Zhang, Y, Lu, X, Khalil, AS, Ladds, G, Luo, X, Ellis, T
Abstract: 

Microbial production of cannabinoids promises to provide a consistent, cheaper, and more sustainable supply of these important therapeutic molecules. However, scaling production to compete with traditional plant-based sources is challenging. Our ability to make strain variants greatly exceeds our capacity to screen and identify high producers, creating a bottleneck in metabolic engineering efforts. Here, we present a yeast-based biosensor for detecting microbially produced Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to increase throughput and lower the cost of screening. We port five human cannabinoid G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) into yeast, showing the cannabinoid type 2 receptor, CB2R, can couple to the yeast pheromone response pathway and report on the concentration of a variety of cannabinoids over a wide dynamic and operational range. We demonstrate that our cannabinoid biosensor can detect THC from microbial cell culture and use this as a tool for measuring relative production yields from a library of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol acid synthase (THCAS) mutants.

Publication ID: 
1422531
Published date: 
20 September 2022
Publication source: 
pubmed
Publication type: 
Journal articles
Journal name: 
Nat Commun
Publication volume: 
13
Publisher: 
Parent title: 
Edition: 
Publication number: