Metabolic engineering of Escherichia coli for high-level production of the biodegradable polyester monomer 2-pyrone-4,6-dicarboxylic acid.

2-Pyrone-4,6-dicarboxylic acid (PDC), a chemically stable pseudo-aromatic dicarboxylic acid, is a promising building block compound for manufacturing biodegradable polyesters. This study aimed to construct high-performance cell factories enabling the efficient production of PDC from glucose. Firstly, the effective enzymes of the PDC biosynthetic pathway were overexpressed on the chromosome of the 3-dehydroshikimate overproducing strain. Consequently, the one-step biosynthesis of PDC from glucose was achieved. Further, the PDC production was enhanced by multi-copy integration of the key gene PsligC encoding 4-carboxy-2-hydroxymuconate-6-semialdehyde dehydrogenase and co-expression of Vitreoscilla hemoglobin. Subsequently, the PDC production was substantially improved by redistributing the metabolic flux for cell growth and PDC biosynthesis based on dynamically downregulating the expression of pyruvate kinase. The resultant strain PDC50 produced 129.37 g/L PDC from glucose within 78 h under fed-batch fermentation conditions, with a yield of 0.528 mol/mol and an average productivity of 1.65 g/L/h. The findings of this study lay the foundation for the potential industrial production of PDC.

[Directed evolution of tyrosine ammonia-lyase to improve the production of p-coumaric acid in Escherichia coli].

p-coumaric acid is an important natural phenolic compound with a variety of pharmacological activities, and also a precursor for the biosynthesis of many natural compounds. It is widely used in foods, cosmetics and medicines. Compared with the chemical synthesis and plant extraction, microbial production of p-coumaric acid has many advantages, such as energy saving and emission reduction. However, the yield of p-coumaric acid by microbial synthesis is too low to meet the requirements of large-scale industrial production. Here, to further improve p-coumaric acid production, the directed evolution of tyrosine ammonia lyase (TAL) encoded by Rhodotorula glutinis tal gene was conducted, and a high-throughput screening method was established to screen the mutant library for improve the property of TAL. A mutant with a doubled TAL catalytic activity was screened from about 10,000 colonies of the mutant library. There were three mutational amino acid sites in this TAL, namely S9Y, A11N, and E518A. It was further verified by a single point saturation mutation. When S9 was mutated to Y, I or N, or A11 was mutated to N, T or Y, the catalytic activity of TAL increased by more than 1-fold. Through combinatorial mutation of three types of mutations at the S9 and A11, the TAL catalytic activity of S9Y/A11N or S9N/A11Y mutants were significantly higher than that of other mutants. Then, the plasmid containing S9N/A11Y mutant was transformed into CP032, a tyrosine-producing E. coli strain. The engineered strain produced 394.2 mg/L p-coumaric acid, which is 2.2-fold higher than that of the control strain, via shake flask fermentation at 48 h. This work provides a new insight for the biosynthesis study of p-coumaric acid.

Development of a Synthetic 3-Dehydroshikimate Biosensor in Escherichia coli for Metabolite Monitoring and Genetic Screening.

Biosensors for target metabolites provide powerful high-throughput screening tools to obtain high-performing strains. However, well-characterized metabolite-sensing modules are often unavailable and limit rapid access to the robust biosensors with successful applications. In this study, we developed a strategy of transcriptome-assisted metabolite-sensing (TAMES) to identify the target metabolite-sensing module based on selectively comparative transcriptome analysis between the target metabolite producing and nonproducing strains and a subsequent quantative reverse transcription (RT-qPCR) evaluation. The strategy was applied to identify the sensing module cusR that responds positively to the metabolite 3-dehydroshikimate (DHS) and proved it was effective to narrow down the candidates. We further constructed the cusR-based synthetic biosensor and established the DHS biosensor-based high-throughput screening (HTS) platform to screen higher DHS-producing strains and successfully increased DHS production by more than 90%. This study demonstrated that the TAMES strategy was effective at exploiting the metabolite-sensing transcriptional regulator, and this could likely be extended to develop the biosensor-based HTS platforms for other molecules.

[Construction and optimization of microbial cell factories for producing cis, cis-muconic acid].

cis, cis-muconic acid (MA) is an important platform chemical. Now, majority of reported engineered strains are genetically instable, the exogenous genes are expressed under the control of expensive inducer and the components of their fermentation medium are complex, thus large-scale microbial production of MA is limited due to the lack of suitable strains. Hence, it is still necessary to construct novel high-performance strain that is genetically stable, no induction and grows in simple inorganic fermentation medium. In this study, after 3 exogenous genes (aroZ, aroY, catA) for biosynthesis of MA were integrated into previously constructed 3-hydroshikimate producing Escherichia coli WJ060 strain and combinatorially regulated with 3 constitutive promoters with different strengths, 27 engineered strains were constructed. The best engineered strain, E. coli MA30 could produce 1.7 g/L MA in the simple inorganic fermentation medium without induction. To further enhance the production capacity of MA, the mutant library of E. coli MA30 was constructed by genome replication engineering and screened via high-throughput assay. After two-round screening, the new strain, E. coli MA30-G2 with improved production of MA was obtained, and the titer of MA increased more than 8%. Under the condition of 5 L fed-batch fermentation, E. coli MA30-G2 could produce about 11.5 g/L MA. Combinatorial regulation and high-throughput screening provide important reference to microbial production of other bio-based chemicals.

[Construction and optimization of Escherichia coli for producing rhamnolipid biosurfactant].

Rhamnolipid biosurfactant is mainly produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa that is the opportunistic pathogenic strain and not suitable for future industrial development. In order to develop a relatively safe microbial strain for the production of rhamnolipid biosurfactant, we constructed engineered Escherichia coli strains for rhamnolipid production by expressing different copy numbers of rhamnosyltransferase (rhlAB) gene with the constitutive synthetic promoters of different strengths in E. coli ATCC 8739. We further studied the combinatorial regulation of rhlAB gene and rhaBDAC gene cluster for dTDP-1-rhamnose biosynthesis with different synthetic promoters, and obtained the best engineered strain-E. coli TIB-RAB226. Through the optimization of culture temperature, the titer of rhamnolipd reached 124.3 mg/L, 1.17 fold higher than that under the original condition. Fed-batch fermentation further improved the production of rhamnolipid and the titer reached the highest 209.2 mg/L within 12 h. High performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) analysis showed that there are total 5 mono-rhamnolipid congeners with different nuclear mass ratio and relative abundance. This study laid foundation for heterologous biosynthesis of rhanomilipd.