Engineering Quillaja saponin biosynthesis pathways for bio-production of QS-21

植物是药物和其他高价值化合物的丰富来源。吗啡是第一个提纯并商业化销售的植物药物，水杨酸是第一个化学合成的药物。然而，尽管取得了这些和其他方面的成功，但由于获取来源物种、提纯化合物和化学合成的挑战，绝大多数植物代谢多样性仍然没有得到开发。我们已经建立了用于快速重建植物代谢途径的瞬时植物表达技术，并证明该系统可以用于获取克级规模的产物。这项技术很容易推广，并已用于疫苗的商业生产。使用HyperTrans系统设计和生产高效Quillaja佐剂QS-21将提供旗舰概念证明，展示该平台在从工厂获得高价值产品方面的力量，并为新的商业项目铺平道路。

Plants are a rich source of drugs and other high-value compounds. Morphine was the first plant drug to be purified and sold commercially and salicylic acid the first to be chemically synthesized. However, despite these and other successes, the vast majority of plant metabolic diversity has remained untapped due to the problems of accessing source species, purifying compounds and the challenges of chemical synthesis. We have established transient plant expression technology for the rapid reconstruction of plant metabolic pathways and demonstrated that this system can be used to access gram-scale quantities of products. This technology is readily scalable and has been used for commercial production of vaccines. The engineering and production of the highly potent Quillaja adjuvant QS-21 using the Hypertrans system will provide a flagship proof of concept to demonstrate the power of this platform for accessing high-value products from plants and pave the way for a new commercial venture.