Break it to make it: Rewiring bacterial metabolism for the growth-coupled biosynthesis of xanthommatin animal pigments

In a recent Nature Biotechnology article, Bushin et al. elegantly rewire the metabolic machinery of a genetically tractable bacterium to intertwine its survival with the production of an exogenously introduced specialized metabolite. This “growth-coupled biosynthesis” approach resulted in impressive gram-scale titers of ommochrome animal pigments with useful biomedical applications.