Abstract
Bacteria have been long proposed to harbor ancestral forms of the bifunctional terpene synthases found in plants. Recent studies described the first identification of these fused bacterial diterpene cyclases/synthases (DCSs). Using genome mining, we found candidate proteins in bacteria that were bioinformatically identified to possess both classes of terpene synthase domains. Here, we report the discovery of a plant-like tridomain bifunctional DCS from Streptomyces albulus. A diterpene overproduction system in E. coli enabled the isolation and structural elucidation of syn-abieta-7,13-diene by NMR, GC-MS, and VCD.