Identification of a second 16-hydroxytabersonine-O-methyltransferase suggests an evolutionary relationship between alkaloid and flavonoid metabolisms in Catharanthus roseus.

The medicinal plant Catharanthus roseus biosynthesizes many important drugs for human health, including the anticancer monoterpene indole alkaloids (MIAs) vinblastine and vincristine. Over the past decades, the continuous increase in pharmaceutical demand has prompted several research groups to characterize MIA biosynthetic pathways for considering future metabolic engineering processes of supply. In line with previous work suggesting that diversification can potentially occur at various steps along the vindoline branch, we were here interested in investigating the involvement of distinct isoforms of tabersonine-16-O-methyltransferase (16OMT) which plays a pivotal role in the MIA biosynthetic pathway. By combining homology searches based on the previously characterized 16OMT1, phylogenetic analyses, functional assays in yeast, and biochemical and in planta characterizations, we identified a second isoform of 16OMT, referred to as 16OMT2. 16OMT2 appears to be a multifunctional enzyme working on both MIA and flavonoid substrates, suggesting that a constrained evolution of the enzyme for accommodating the MIA substrate has probably occurred to favor the apparition of 16OMT2 from an ancestral specific flavonoid-O-methyltransferase. Since 16OMT1 and 16OMT2 displays a high sequence identity and similar kinetic parameters for 16-hydroxytabersonine, we postulate that 16OMT1 may result from a later 16OMT2 gene duplication accompanied by a continuous neofunctionalization leading to an almost complete loss of flavonoid O-methyltransferase activity. Overall, these results participate in increasing our knowledge on the evolutionary processes that have likely led to enzyme co-optation for MIA synthesis.