Monoterpenes are liquid hydrocarbons with applications ranging from flavor and fragrance to replacement jet fuel. Their toxicity, however, presents a major challenge for microbial synthesis. Here we evolved limonene-tolerant Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains and sequenced six strains across the 200-generation evolutionary time course. Mutations were found in the tricalbin proteins Tcb2p and Tcb3p. Genomic reconstruction in the parent strain showed that truncation of a single protein (tTcb3p(1-989)), but not its complete deletion, was sufficient to recover the evolved phenotype improving limonene fitness 9-fold. tTcb3p(1-989) increased tolerance toward two other monoterpenes (β-pinene and myrcene) 11- and 8-fold, respectively, and tolerance toward the biojet fuel blend AMJ-700t (10% cymene, 50% limonene, 40% farnesene) 4-fold. tTcb3p(1-989) is the first example of successful engineering of phase tolerance and creates opportunities for production of the highly toxic C10 alkenes in yeast.
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Brennan et al. (2015) studied this question.