Microbe Engineering of Guaia-6,10(14)-diene as a Building Block for the Semisynthetic Production of Plant-Derived (−)-Englerin A

Herein, we report the semisynthetic production of the potent transient receptor potential canonical (TRPC) channel agonist (−)-englerin A (EA), using guaia-6,10(14)-diene as the starting material. Guaia-6,10(14)-diene was systematically engineered in Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae using the CRISPR/Cas9 system and produced with high titers. This provided us the opportunity to execute a concise chemical synthesis of EA and the two related guaianes (−)-oxyphyllol and (+)-orientalol E. The potentially scalable approach combines the advantages of synthetic biology and chemical synthesis and provides an efficient and economical method for producing EA as well as its analogs.