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Roles of export genes cgmA and lysE for the production of l-arginine and l-citrulline by Corynebacterium glutamicum

  • Applied microbial and cell physiology
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Abstract

l-arginine is a semi-essential amino acid with application in cosmetic, pharmaceutical, and food industries. Metabolic engineering strategies have been applied for overproduction of l-arginine by Corynebacterium glutamicum. LysE was the only known l-arginine exporter of this bacterium. However, an l-arginine-producing strain carrying a deletion of lysE still accumulated about 10 mM l-arginine in the growth medium. Overexpression of the putative putrescine and cadaverine export permease gene cgmA was shown to compensate for the lack of lysE with regard to l-arginine export. Moreover, plasmid-borne overexpression of cgmA rescued the toxic effect caused by feeding of the dipeptide Arg-Ala to lysE-deficient C. glutamicum and argO-deficient Escherichia coli strains. Deletion of the repressor gene cgmR improved l-arginine titers by 5 %. Production of l-lysine and l-citrulline was not affected by cgmA overexpression. Taken together, CgmA may function as an export system not only for the diamine putrescine and cadaverine but also for l-arginine. The major export system for l-lysine and l-arginine LysE may also play a role in l-citrulline export since production of l-citrulline was reduced when lysE was deleted and improved by 45 % when lysE was overproduced.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Linea Muhsal for her contribution and preliminary experimental results and Lothar Eggeling for providing the plasmid pk18mobsacBΔlysEG. João M. P. Jorge and Fernando Pérez-García acknowledge PhD fellowships from the CLIB2021 graduate cluster at Bielefeld University. Hironori Taniguchi acknowledges support by a PhD fellowship from the DAAD. This work was supported in part by grant KF2969003SB2 from BMWi in the ZIM program.

Author’s contributions

J.M.P.J., D.L., H.T., and V.F.W. designed the study. J.M.P.J., F.P.G., and D.L. performed the experiments. All authors analyzed the data and drafted the manuscript. V.F.W. finalized the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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  1. Faculty of Biology and CeBiTec, Bielefeld University, Universitätsstr. 25, 33615, Bielefeld, Germany

    Dorit Lubitz, João M. P. Jorge, Fernando Pérez-García, Hironori Taniguchi & Volker F. Wendisch

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  1. Dorit Lubitz
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  2. João M. P. Jorge
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Correspondence to Volker F. Wendisch.

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Dorit Lubitz and João M. P. Jorge contributed equally to this work.

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Lubitz, D., Jorge, J.M.P., Pérez-García, F. et al. Roles of export genes cgmA and lysE for the production of l-arginine and l-citrulline by Corynebacterium glutamicum . Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 100, 8465–8474 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-016-7695-1

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