Engineering Saccharomyces cerevisiae for efficient production of glucaric acid / 生物工程学报

As an important dicarboxylic acids existing in nature, glucaric acid has been widely used in medical, health, and polymer materials industry, therefore it is considered as one of the "top value-added chemicals from biomass". In this study, using Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a chassis microorganism, the effects of overexpression of myo-inositol transporter Itr1, fusional expression of inositol oxygenase MIOX4 and uronate dehydrogenase Udh, and down-expression of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase gene ZWF1 on the glucaric acid production were investigated. The results showed that the yield of glucaric acid was increased by 26% compared with the original strain Bga-3 under shake flask fermentation after overexpressing myo-inositol transporter Itr1. The yield of glucaric acid was increased by 40% compared with Bga-3 strain by expressing the MIOX4-Udh fusion protein. On these basis, the production of glucaric acid reached 5.5 g/L, which was 60% higher than that of Bga-3 strain. In a 5 L fermenter, the highest yield of glucaric acid was 10.85 g/L, which was increased 80% compared with that of Bga-3 strain. The application of the above metabolic engineering strategy improved the pathway efficiency and the yield of glucaric acid, which may serve as a reference for engineering S. cerevisiae to produce other chemicals.

Construction of a glucaric acid biosensor for screening myo-inositol oxygenase variants / 生物工程学报

Glucaric acid (GA), a top value-added chemical from biomass, has been widely used for prevention and control of diseases and the production of polymer materials. In GA biosynthesis pathway, the conversion of inositol to glucuronic acid that catalyzed by myo-inositol oxygenase is the limiting step. It is necessary to improve MIOX activity. In the present study, we constructed a high-throughput screening system through combing the concentration of GA with the green fluorescent protein fluorescence intensity. By applying this screening system, three positive variants (K59V/R60A, R171S and D276A) screened from the mutant library. In comparison, the recombinant strain Escherichia coli BL21(DE3)/MU-R171S accumulated more GA, 136.5% of that of the parent strain.

Metabolic engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for production of glucaric acid / 生物工程学报

Glucaric acid, a high value-added organic acid, is widely used in food, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. For microbial production of glucaric acid in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we constructed a synthetic glucaric acid biosynthetic pathway by coexpressing the genes encoding myo-inositol oxygenase from mice and uronate dehydrogenase from Pseudomonas putida. Moreover, myo-inositol-1-phosphate synthase was identified as a rate-limiting enzyme in glucaric acid pathway and was upregulated, resulting in the production of glucaric acid of (107.51±10.87) mg/L, a 2.8-fold increase compared to the parent strain. Then, by repressing the activity of phosphofructokinase, the concentration of glucaric acid further increased to (230.22±10.75) mg/L. The strategy could be further used to construct cell factories for glucaric acid production.