Discovery of FoTO1 and Taxol genes enables biosynthesis of baccatin III

Abstract Plants make complex and potent therapeutic molecules 1,2 , but sourcing these molecules from natural producers or through chemical synthesis is difficult, which limits their use in the clinic. A prominent example is the anti-cancer therapeutic paclitaxel (sold under the brand name Taxol), which is derived from yew trees ( Taxus species) 3 . Identifying the full paclitaxel biosynthetic pathway would enable heterologous production of the drug, but this has yet to be achieved despite half a century of research 4 . Within Taxus ’ large, enzyme-rich genome 5 , we suspected that the paclitaxel pathway would be difficult to resolve using conventional RNA-sequencing and co-expression analyses. Here, to…