Carotenoids: Carotenoid and Apocarotenoid Biosynthesis, Metabolic Engineering and Synthetic Biology

As a Ph.D student, Eleanore Wurtzel innovated gene tagging and isolated the first genes for two-component signaling in bacteria, laying the foundation for study of signaling mechanisms found throughout nature, including plants. With an NSF postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Wurtzel boldly changed fields from bacterial membrane biochemistry to plant biology, when maize was the only model system. She established some of the first experiments on plant chromatin structure as an NSF Plant Biology postdoctoral fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory. She then joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and began research on maize carotenoid biosynthesis, then a poorly studied area. Dr. Wurtzel next joined the Biological Sciences Department at Lehman College, City University of New York, where she is currently a Full Professor and on the faculty of the CUNY Biology and Biochemistry PhD programs. Eleanore Wurtzel has made fundamental and longstanding contributions to the field of plant carotenoid biosynthesis, plant biochemistry, and plant metabolic engineering which are enabling improvement of crops for sustainable solutions to global vitamin A deficiency affecting the health and mortality of 250 million children worldwide. Dr. Wurtzel is grateful to the many students, postdocs, and visiting scientists who have contributed to her laboratory’s research for which she has been recognized as a Fellow of AAAS, Fellow of ASPB, and most recently as a Fellow of the International Carotenoid Society. Dr. Wurtzel serves as a Monitoring Editor of Plant Physiology. Dr. Wurtzel has also been a long-standing elected member of the Gordon Research Conferences (GRC) Board of Trustees. She has been instrumental at GRC in developing and contributing to programs for women in science. She also founded and chaired the first GRC on Plant Metabolic Engineering and founded the GRC seminar for early career scientists for both the GRC Plant Metabolic Engineering community and the GRC Carotenoids community.

• 1. Metabolomics-based analysis of carotenoids and related metabolites in various species via quantitative trait loci and genome wide association mapping approaches2. Enzymatic isomerization of ζ-carotene mediated by the heme-containing isomerase Z-ISO3. Using bacteria for functional analysis of genes encoding carotenoid biosynthetic enzymes4. Rice Callus as a High Throughput Platform for Synthetic Biology and Metabolic Engineering of Carotenoids5. Transient expression in Nicotiana benthamiana: A simple platform to investigate genes encoding carotenoid biosynthesis enzymes from diverse algal lineages6. Protein-protein interaction techniques to investigate post-translational regulation of carotenogenesis7. The isolation of sub-chromoplast structures from tomato and capsicum fruit8. Carrot protoplasts as a suitable method for protein subcellular localization9. High throughput production and characterization of carotenoid enzymes for structural and functional studies10. Production and structural characterization of the cytochrome P450 enzymes in carotene ring hydroxylation11. Characterizing CYTOCHROME P450 Enzymes Involved in Plant Apocarotenoid Metabolism by Using Engineered Yeast System12. Preparation of carotenoid cleavage dioxygenases for crystallography13. Heme-dependent enzymes involved in carotenoids biosynthesis in plants14. Tracking sub-plastidic localization of carotenoid metabolic enzymes with proteomics15. Golden Rice and lessons learned for inspiring future metabolic engineering strategies and synthetic biology solutions16. Genetic transformation of Cassava to improve carotenoids: a protocol revisited17. Elevating fruit carotenoid content in apple (Malus x domestica Borkh)18. Engineering microbial synthesis of carotenoids19. The breeder's tool-box for enhancing the content of esterified carotenoids in wheat: from extraction and profiling of carotenoids to marker-assisted selection of candidate genes20. Drawing on enzyme promiscuity to create novel carotenoids via non-phytoene precursors21. Plant abscisic acid receptor agonists and antagonists22. A synthetic biology approach to study carotenoid production in Corynebacterium glutamicum: read-out by a genetically encoded biosensor combined with perturbing native gene expression by CRISPRi23. Designing biosensors from a plant apocarotenoid receptor24. Imaging Retinaldehyde-Protein Binding in Plants using a Merocyanine Reporter 25. Use of directed enzyme evolution to create novel biosynthetic pathways for production of non-natural and rare carotenoids