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Natural products have long served as both a source and inspiration for pharmaceuticals. Modifying the structure of a natural product often improves the biological activity of the compound. Metabolic engineering strategies to ferment “unnatural” products have been enormously successful in microbial organisms. However, despite the importance of plant derived natural products, metabolic engineering strategies to yield unnatural products from complex, lengthy plant pathways have not been widely explored. Here, we show that RNA mediated suppression of tryptamine biosynthesis in Catharanthus roseus hairy root culture eliminates all production of monoterpene indole alkaloids, a class of natural products derived from two starting substrates, tryptamine and secologanin. To exploit this chemically silent background, we introduced an unnatural tryptamine analog to the production media and demonstrated that the …