UC Berkeley

Fluorine is an element with unusual properties that has found significant utility in the design of synthetic small molecules, ranging from therapeutics to materials. In contrast, only a few fluorinated compounds made by living organisms have been found to date, most of which derive from the fluoroacetate/fluorothreonine biosynthetic pathway first discovered in Streptomyces cattleya While fluoroacetate has long been known to act as an inhibitor of the tricarboxylic acid cycle, the fate of the amino acid fluorothreonine is still not well understood. Here, we show that fluorothreonine can be misincorporated into protein in place of the proteinogenic amino acid threonine. We have identified two conserved proteins from the organofluorine biosynthetic locus, FthB and FthC, that are involved in managing fluorothreonine toxicity. Using a combination of biochemical, genetic, physiological, and proteomic studies, we show that FthB is a trans-acting transfer RNA (tRNA) editing protein, which hydrolyzes fluorothreonyl-tRNA 670-fold more efficiently than threonyl-RNA, and assign a role to FthC in fluorothreonine transport. While trans-acting tRNA editing proteins have been found to counteract the misacylation of tRNA with commonly occurring near-cognate amino acids, their role has yet to be described in the context of secondary metabolism. In this regard, the recruitment of tRNA editing proteins to biosynthetic clusters may have enabled the evolution of pathways to produce specialized amino acids, thereby increasing the diversity of natural product structure while also attenuating the risk of mistranslation that would ensue.