Artificial farnesol epoxidase enables a concise synthesis of meroterpenoids.

Summary: Making complex medicines and chemicals from nature can be really hard and take a lot of steps. Scientists have always struggled to change one specific part of a molecule called farnesol because it is very stubborn and won't react easily. Now, researchers have created a custom "tool" (an engineered enzyme) that easily changes this stubborn part. This new tool acts like a shortcut, cutting the number of steps needed to build these important molecules by more than half!