Abstract:The terminal alkyne is a functionality widely used in organic synthesis, pharmaceutical science, material science, and bioorthogonal chemistry. This functionality is also found in acetylenic natural products, but the underlying biosynthetic pathways for its formation are not well understood. Here we report the characterization of the first carrier proteindependent terminal alkyne biosynthetic machinery in microbes. We further demonstrate that this enzymatic machinery can be exploited for the in situ generation and incorporation of terminal alkynes into two natural product scaffolds in E. coli. These results highlight the prospect for tagging major classes of natural products, including polyketides and polyketide/non-ribosomal peptide hybrids, using biosynthetic pathway engineering.2 Natural products are important small molecules widely used as drugs, pesticides, herbicides, and biological probes. Tagging natural products with a unique chemical handle enables the visualization, enrichment, quantification, and mode of action study of natural products through bioorthogonal chemistry [1][2][3][4] . One prevalent bioorthogonal reaction is the triazole-forming azide-alkyne [3+2] cycloaddition, often referred to as "click" chemistry 5 . This reaction has enabled selective imaging and study of azide-or alkyne-labeled glycans, proteins, nucleic acids and lipids. Despite the success with macromolecules, the labeling of natural products has not been adequately explored. It is often challenging to obtain tagged natural products through total synthesis because of their structural complexity, or through semi-synthesis because of their chemical lability and the limited supply of most natural products. Alternatively, precursor-directed biosynthesis (PDB) may be employed to produce azide-or alkyne-labeled natural products based on the promiscuity of biosynthetic machinery. Mainly used as a tool to introduce structural diversity, PDB has allowed us and other researchers to generate labeled natural products 3,[6][7][8] . However, the coexistence of diffusible precursors and final products 9 with the same chemical handle introduces significant background in the PDB production system, making it incompatible with in situ bioorthogonal chemical transformations. We report here the de novo biosynthesis of alkyne-labeled natural products without the feeding of alkynoic precursors by characterizing and engineering the novel terminal alkyne synthetic machinery that living systems offer.Many acetylenic natural products contain a terminal alkyne functionality, which seems to be crucial for their bioactivity (Fig. 1) 10,11 . Terminal alkynes can be formed by acetylenases, a special family of desaturases that catalyze O 2 -dependent dehydrogenation of C-C bonds in a diiron dependent mechanism 12 . Several membrane-bound acetylenases have recently been 3 identified from plants, insects, fungi, and bacteria 4,10,[13][14][15][16][17] , but all of these reports have been limited to bioinformatics or in vivo studies through mutagenesis or ...