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Redirecting carbon flux through pgi-deficient and heterologous transhydrogenase toward efficient succinate production in Corynebacterium glutamicum

  • Genetics and Molecular Biology of Industrial Organisms - Original Paper
  • Published:
Journal of Industrial Microbiology & Biotechnology

Abstract

Corynebacterium glutamicum is particularly known for its potentiality in succinate production. We engineered C. glutamicum for the production of succinate. To enhance C3–C4 carboxylation efficiency, chromosomal integration of the pyruvate carboxylase gene pyc resulted in strain NC-4. To increase intracellular NADH pools, the pntAB gene from Escherichia coli, encoding for transhydrogenase, was chromosomally integrated into NC-4, leading to strain NC-5. Furthermore, we deleted pgi gene in strain NC-5 to redirect carbon flux to the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP). To solve the drastic reduction of PTS-mediated glucose uptake, the ptsG gene from C. glutamicum, encoding for the glucose-specific transporter, was chromosomally integrated into pgi-deficient strain resulted in strain NC-6. In anaerobic batch fermentation, the production of succinate in pntAB-overexpressing strain NC-5 increased by 14% and a product yield of 1.22 mol/mol was obtained. In anaerobic fed-batch process, succinic acid concentration reached 856 mM by NC-6. The yields of succinate from glucose were 1.37 mol/mol accompanied by a very low level of by-products. Activating PPP and transhydrogenase in combination led to a succinate yield of 1.37 mol/mol, suggesting that they exhibited a synergistic effect for improving succinate yield.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the 973 Program of China (Grant No. 2011CB707405).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, 211816, China

    Chen Wang, Zhihui Zhou, Heng Cai & Hongtao Xu

  2. College of Food Science and Engineering, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot, 010018, China

    Zhongjun Chen & Hongtao Xu

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  1. Chen Wang
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Correspondence to Heng Cai.

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Wang, C., Zhou, Z., Cai, H. et al. Redirecting carbon flux through pgi-deficient and heterologous transhydrogenase toward efficient succinate production in Corynebacterium glutamicum . J Ind Microbiol Biotechnol 44, 1115–1126 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10295-017-1933-0

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