Campus Units
Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Publication Date
2-2010
Journal or Book Title
Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology
Volume
85
Issue
6
First Page
1893
Last Page
1906
DOI
10.1007/s00253-009-2219-x
Abstract
Engineering biosynthetic pathways in heterologous microbial host organisms offers an elegant approach to pathway elucidation via the incorporation of putative biosynthetic enzymes and characterization of resulting novel metabolites. Our previous work in Escherichia coli demonstrated the feasibility of a facile modular approach to engineering the production of labdane-related diterpene (20 carbon) natural products. However, yield was limited (<0.1 mg/L), presumably due to reliance on endogenous production of the isoprenoid precursors dimethylallyl diphosphate and isopentenyl diphosphate. Here, we report incorporation of either a heterologous mevalonate pathway (MEV) or enhancement of the endogenous methyl erythritol phosphate pathway (MEP) with our modular metabolic engineering system. With MEP pathway enhancement, it was found that pyruvate supplementation of rich media and simultaneous overexpression of three genes (idi, dxs, and dxr) resulted in the greatest increase in diterpene yield, indicating distributed metabolic control within this pathway. Incorporation of a heterologous MEV pathway in bioreactor grown cultures resulted in significantly higher yields than MEP pathway enhancement. We have established suitable growth conditions for diterpene production levels ranging from 10 to >100 mg/L of E. coli culture. These amounts are sufficient for nuclear magnetic resonance analyses, enabling characterization of enzymatic products and hence, pathway elucidation. Furthermore, these results represent an up to >1,000-fold improvement in diterpene production from our facile, modular platform, with MEP pathway enhancement offering a cost effective alternative with reasonable yield. Finally, we reiterate here that this modular approach is expandable and should be easily adaptable to the production of any terpenoid natural product.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Copyright Owner
The Authors
Copyright Date
2009
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Morrone, Dana; Lowry, Luke; Determan, Mara K.; Hershey, David M.; Xu, Meimei; and Peters, Reuben J., "Increasing diterpene yield with a modular metabolic engineering system in E. coli: comparison of MEV and MEP isoprenoid precursor pathway engineering" (2010). Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology Publications. 121.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/bbmb_ag_pubs/121
Comments
This is an article published as Morrone, D., Lowry, L., Determan, M.K. et al. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol (2010) 85: 1893. doi:10.1007/s00253-009-2219-x. Posted with permission.