Growth-coupled microbial biosynthesis of the animal pigment xanthommatin.

Growth-coupled biosynthesis in Pseudomonas putida achieves gram-scale xanthommatin production by linking pigment synthesis to C1 metabolism, reaching significant bioproduction levels.

• Why it matters: Efforts to produce complex natural products like xanthommatin in microbes are hampered by low yields and resource-intensive optimization, limiting practical applications.
• What they did: A novel strategy was developed that couples bacterial growth to pigment biosynthesis through a feedback loop utilizing formate released during production, demonstrated in a C1-deficient strain.
• The result: This approach enables efficient, scalable production of xanthommatin and offers a general method to accelerate natural product biosynthesis in bacteria via C1 metabolism restoration.