Interactive science
The capsaicin pathway
Capsaicinoids are built by condensing vanillylamine with a branched fatty-acid chain. The interesting question is which step limits output — and the answer reorients how you engineer for heat.
The pathway
Where the heat is actually controlled
Tap a step. The vanillylamine branch (red) carries the flux control; the condensation enzyme the field assumed was rate-limiting (grey) does not.
pAMT — Aminotransferase → vanillylamine
Produces vanillylamine. This branch carries the ~90% flux control — the real lever for raising output.
Flux control: high
From constraint-based flux modeling over developmental RNA-seq. A computational finding; see how we know.
Why this matters
The field has long assumed the condensation enzyme Pun1/AT3 is the bottleneck. Our constraint-based flux model, built over developmental RNA-seq, says otherwise: the vanillylamine branch carries the flux control, and Pun1/AT3 carries almost none. So the lever for higher capsaicinoid output is precursor supply, not the condensation step — which is exactly what our designs act on.
This is a computational finding on public sequencing data. See how we know what we know and the validation tracker.