A stunning discovery and combined effort have uncovered a new type of triterpenes, a key source of many medicines. Until recently, all triterpenes were thought to be produced from squalene, another form of triterpene.

Scientists have seen triterpenes in fungi for the first time without the use of squalene during biosynthesis, the creation of complex molecules from simpler ones in living organisms. This significant breakthrough in pharmaceutical research throws up a whole new world of possibilities.

Triterpenes are chemical molecules found in abundance in animals, plants, microbes, and even humans. About 20,000 distinct triterpenes have been discovered, and their anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, anti-diabetic, and other beneficial qualities have led to their widespread application in cosmetics, food supplements, and, most importantly, medicine. All known triterpenes were formerly assumed to be produced from the same precursor or source, squalene.

However, a collaboration between the University of Tokyo and KEK in Japan, Wuhan University in China, and Bonn University in Germany has discovered a novel type of triterpene that does not require squalene, as reported in Nature.

“Nobody could have imagined this happening in nature,” Professor Ikuro Abe of the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences remarked, “This is the discovery of a new biosynthetic machine.”

When human bodies employ squalene to make hormones and bile acid, numerous enzyme processes are often required to form complex chemical compounds. A small molecule called a C5 isoprene unit, or building block, was the starting for constructing a very complex triterpene molecular structure in just one enzyme reaction.

The team at Wuhan University almost made the discovery by accident. They were working on genome mining to find new natural products when they found it. They weren’t specifically looking for triterpenes, but they did discover novel genes that were broadly distributed in fungi. “They didn’t know the genes’ function,” Abe explained. “So they did a characterization of these news genes, and one of them happened to be triterpene synthesis.”

That’s when they invited the other teams to join in. According to Abe, the Bonn University team is skilled at chemistry, so they concentrated on explaining the detailed enzyme reaction mechanism, while experts from the University of Tokyo and KEK used their structural analysis knowledge. He claims that once you’ve figured out the structure, you can change it. “Change something here or there and see what happens. We can understand the structure-function relationship, ” He explained, “It’s like a puzzle.”

“Chemistry in nature is more efficient than the chemical synthesis we use in industry. That is why we are interested in the biosynthetic processes done in nature ,” Abe explained. “Nature’s method is a better, cheaper and cleaner process. We are trying to better understand how processes take place in nature so that we can recreate or redesign it in the lab, to get more and more important and useful compounds .”

This new finding is just the start. “Now that we have solved the protein structure, we are already manipulating the biosynthetic machinery to try to produce more useful molecules, for example, for drug development,” Abe added.

Image Credit: Getty

You were reading: Scientists Have Found A New Type Of Triterpenes That Doesn’t Need Squalene