Production of fine heterologus pathways in microbial hosts is frequently hindered by insufficient knowledge of the native metabolic pathway and its cognate enzymes; often the pathway is unresolved and enzymes lack detailed characterization. An alternative paradigm to using native pathways is de novo pathway design using well-characterized, substrate-promiscuous enzymes. We demonstrate this concept using P450BM3 from Bacillus megaterium. Using a computer model, we illustrate how key P450BM3 activ site mutations enable binding of non-native substrate amorphadiene, incorporating these mutations into P450BM3 enabled the selective oxidation of amorphadiene arteminsinic-11s,12-epoxide, at titers of 250 mg L"1 in E. coli. We also demonstrate high-yeilding, selective transformations to dihydroartemisinic acid, the immediate precursor to the high value anti-malarial drug artemisinin.

In Allison Hedge Coke’s 2015 poem “Pando/Pando,” Pando is, in one instance, the site of a 2008 massacre in Bolivia, in which thirteen Evo Morales supporters, many Indigenous, were killed by a militia backed by a US-supported right-wing opposition. While this support clearly illustrates the longstanding exertion of US influence over Latin American countries, it also moves across related sites of settler territorialities to reaffirm in Bolivia the structures of racialized hierarchization and Indigenous elimination as the very grounds of sociopolitical legitimacy and normativity through which the US controls its own “domestic” political space. This essay wants to show how Hedge Coke’s poem engages with this transnational production of settler territorialities while redefining the linkage between the two sites as a decolonial crossing. For, secondly, “Pando” refers to a giant clonal colony in present-day Utah: a forest-sized tree and the “largest living organism on earth.” The poem links this form of Indigenous growth at a site of colonial violence via “Pando” to Morales and the Indigenous political movement he signifies. As it connects these different forms of Indigenous (political) life through their rootedness within their specific lands, the poem works to disrupt the normativity of any territorial settler claim. Beyond the limited settler state conceptions of politics as a centralized project of hierarchization, “Pando/Pando” envisions instead a multiscalar structure of relationships as the normative principle of sociopolitical formation, in which transnational settler colonial connections are redrawn as decolonial pluralities of Indigenous territorialities and dimensions of political life.