Production of industrial chemicals using renewable biomass feedstock is becoming increasingly important to address limited fossil resources, climate change and other environmental problems. To develop high-performance microbial cell factories, equivalent to chemical plants, microorganisms undergo systematic metabolic engineering to efficiently convert biomass-derived carbon sources into target chemicals. Over the past two decades, many engineered microorganisms capable of producing natural and non-natural chemicals have been developed. This Review details the current status of representative industrial chemicals that are produced through biological and/or chemical reactions. We present a comprehensive bio-based chemicals map that highlights the strategies and pathways of single or multiple biological reactions, chemical reactions and combinations thereof towards production of particular chemicals of interest. Future challenges are also discussed to enable production of even more diverse chemicals and more efficient production of chemicals from renewable feedstocks.

A comprehensive metabolic map for production of bio-based chemicals

Corynebacterium glutamicum, Escherichia coli, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae in particular, have become established as important industrial workhorses in biotechnology. Recent years have seen tremendous progress in their advance into tailor-made producers, driven by the upcoming demand for sustainable processes and renewable raw materials. Here, the diversity and complexity of nature is simultaneously a challenge and a benefit. Harnessing biodiversity in the right manner through synergistic progress in systems metabolic engineering and chemical synthesis promises a future innovative bio-economy.

Advanced Biotechnology: Metabolically Engineered Cells for the Bio-Based Production of Chemicals and Fuels, Materials, and Health-Care Products

Corynebacterium glutamicum is an important organism for the industrial production of amino acids. Metabolic pathways in this organism are usually engineered by conventional methods such as homologous recombination, which depends on rare double-crossover events. To facilitate the mapping of gene expression levels to metabolic outputs, we applied CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) technology using deactivated Cas9 (dCas9) to repress genes in C. glutamicum. We then determined the effects of target repression on amino acid titers. Single-guide RNAs directing dCas9 to specific targets reduced expression of pgi and pck up to 98%, and of pyk up to 97%, resulting in titer enhancement ratios of l-lysine and l-glutamate production comparable to levels achieved by gene deletion. This approach for C. glutamicum metabolic engineering, which only requires 3 days, indicates that CRISPRi can be used for quick and efficient metabolic pathway remodeling without the need for gene deletions or mutations and subsequent selection.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acssynbio.5b00216

Corynebacterium glutamicum Metabolic Engineering with CRISPR Interference (CRISPRi)

Metabolically engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum for bio-based production of chemicals, fuels, materials, and healthcare products.

l-Amino acids find various applications in biotechnology. l-Glutamic acid and its salts are used as flavor enhancers. Other l-amino acids are used as food or feed additives, in parenteral nutrition or as building blocks for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. l-amino acids are synthesized from precursors of central carbon metabolism. Based on the knowledge of the biochemical pathways microbial fermentation processes of food, feed and pharma amino acids have been developed. Production strains of Corynebacterium glutamicum, which has been used safely for more than 50 years in food biotechnology, and Escherichia coli are constantly improved using metabolic engineering approaches. Research towards new processes is ongoing. Fermentative production of l-amino acids in the million-ton-scale has shaped modern biotechnology and its markets continue to grow steadily. This review focusses on recent achievements in strain development for amino acid production including the use of CRISPRi/dCas9, genome-reduced strains, biosensors and synthetic pathways to enable utilization of alternative carbon sources.

Updates on industrial production of amino acids using Corynebacterium glutamicum.

L-ornithine is a non-essential amino acid for various industrial applications in food industry. In this study, Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032 was metabolically engineered for the production of L-ornithine. First, the proB and argF genes were deleted to block the competitive branch pathway and to block the conversion of L-ornithine to citrulline, respectively. In addition, the argR gene encoding the regulatory repressor of the L-arginine operon was also deleted. The resulting strain produced 230 mg/L of L-ornithine from glucose in flask culture. This base strain was further engineered by the plasmid-based overexpression of the argCJBD genes from C. glutamicum ATCC 21831, which resulted in the production of 7.19 g/L of L-ornithine. To enrich the NADPH pool, the carbon flux was redirected towards the pentose phosphate pathway by changing the start codons of the pgi and zwf genes and replacing the native promoter of the tkt operon with the strong sod promoter. Fed-batch cultivation of this final strain YW06 (pSY223) allowed production of 51.5 g/L of L-ornithine in 40 h with the overall productivity of 1.29 g/L/h. The results obtained in this study demonstrate the possibility of efficiently producing L-ornithine by metabolically engineered C. glutamicum. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2015;112: 416–421. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Metabolic engineering of Corynebacterium glutamicum for the production of L‐ornithine

L-arginine is an important amino acid for diverse industrial and health product applications. Here we report the development of metabolically engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 21831 for the production of L-arginine. Random mutagenesis is first performed to increase the tolerance of C. glutamicum to L-arginine analogues, followed by systems metabolic engineering for further strain improvement, involving removal of regulatory repressors of arginine operon, optimization of NADPH level, disruption of L-glutamate exporter to increase L-arginine precursor and flux optimization of rate-limiting L-arginine biosynthetic reactions. Fed-batch fermentation of the final strain in 5 l and large-scale 1,500 l bioreactors allows production of 92.5 and 81.2 g l(-1) of L-arginine with the yields of 0.40 and 0.35 g L-arginine per gram carbon source (glucose plus sucrose), respectively. The systems metabolic engineering strategy described here will be useful for engineering Corynebacteria strains for the industrial production of L-arginine and related products.

Seo Yun Kim

Papers

Metabolic engineering of Corynebacterium glutamicum for the production of L‐ornithine

Metabolic engineering of corynebacterium glutamicum for L-ornithine production