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Improved l-ornithine production in Corynebacterium crenatum by introducing an artificial linear transacetylation pathway

  • Metabolic Engineering and Synthetic Biology - Original Paper
  • Published:
Journal of Industrial Microbiology & Biotechnology

Abstract

l-Ornithine is a non-protein amino acid with extensive applications in the food and pharmaceutical industries. In this study, we performed metabolic pathway engineering of an l-arginine hyper-producing strain of Corynebacterium crenatum for L-ornithine production. First, we amplified the L-ornithine biosynthetic pathway flux by blocking the competing branch of the pathway. To enhance L-ornithine synthesis, we performed site-directed mutagenesis of the ornithine-binding sites to solve the problem of l-ornithine feedback inhibition for ornithine acetyltransferase. Alternatively, the genes argA from Escherichia coli and argE from Serratia marcescens, encoding the enzymes N-acetyl glutamate synthase and N-acetyl-l-ornithine deacetylase, respectively, were introduced into Corynebacterium crenatum to mimic the linear pathway of L-ornithine biosynthesis. Fermentation of the resulting strain in a 5-L bioreactor allowed a dramatically increased production of L-ornithine, 40.4 g/L, with an overall productivity of 0.673 g/L/h over 60 h. This demonstrates that an increased level of transacetylation is beneficial for L-ornithine biosynthesis.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31770058, 31570085), the Jiangsu Province Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (BK20150002), the Research Project of the Chinese Ministry of Education (113033A), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (JUSRP51708A), the national first-class discipline program of Light Industry Technology and Engineering (LITE2018-06) and the 111 Project (111-2-06).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Key Laboratory of Industrial Biotechnology, Ministry of Education, School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, 214122, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China

    Qunfeng Shu, Meijuan Xu, Jing Li, Taowei Yang, Xian Zhang, Zhenghong Xu & Zhiming Rao

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  1. Qunfeng Shu
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  2. Meijuan Xu
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  3. Jing Li
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Correspondence to Meijuan Xu or Zhiming Rao.

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Shu, Q., Xu, M., Li, J. et al. Improved l-ornithine production in Corynebacterium crenatum by introducing an artificial linear transacetylation pathway. J Ind Microbiol Biotechnol 45, 393–404 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10295-018-2037-1

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