Bioretrosynthetic construction of a didanosine biosynthetic pathway

Concatenation of engineered biocatalysts into multistep pathways dramatically increases their utility, but development of generalizable assembly methods remains a significant challenge. Herein we evaluate ‘bioretrosynthesis’, which is an application of the retrograde evolution hypothesis, for biosynthetic pathway construction. To test bioretrosynthesis, we engineered a pathway for synthesis of the antiretroviral nucleoside analog didanosine (2,3-dideoxyinosine). Applying both directed evolution and structure-based approaches, we began pathway construction with a retro-extension from an engineered purine nucleoside phosphorylase and evolved 1,5-phosphopentomutase to accept the substrate 2,3-dideoxyribose 5-phosphate with a 700-fold change in substrate selectivity and 3-fold increased turnover in cell lysate. A subsequent retrograde pathway extension, via ribokinase engineering, resulted in a didanosine pathway with a 9,500-fold change in nucleoside production selectivity and 50-fold increase in didanosine production. Unexpectedly, the result of this bioretrosynthetic step was not a retro-extension from phosphopentomutase, but rather the discovery of a fortuitous pathway-shortening bypass via the engineered ribokinase.