Abstract
Escherichia coli strain CAR001 that produces β-carotene was genetically engineered to produce lycopene by deleting genes encoding zeaxanthin glucosyltransferase (crtX) and lycopene β-cyclase (crtY) from the crtEXYIB operon. The resulting strain, LYC001, produced 10.5 mg lycopene/l (6.5 mg/g dry cell weight, DCW). Modulating expression of genes encoding α-ketoglutarate dehydrogenase, succinate dehydrogenase and transaldolase B within central metabolic modules increased NADPH and ATP supplies, leading to a 76 % increase of lycopene yield. Ribosome binding site libraries were further used to modulate expression of genes encoding 1-deoxy-d-xylulose-5-phosphate synthase (dxs) and isopentenyl diphosphate isomerase (idi) and the crt gene operon, which improved the lycopene yield by 32 %. The optimal strain LYC010 produced 3.52 g lycopene/l (50.6 mg/g DCW) in fed-batch fermentation.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by grants from Tianjin Key Technology R&D program of Tianjin Municipal Science and Technology Commission (12ZCZDSY14700), National Basic Research Program of China (2011CBA00800) and National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2012AA02A704). Xueli Zhang was supported by the Hundred Talent Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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This work has been included in a patent application by Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology.
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Tao Sun and Liangtian Miao have contributed equally to this work.
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Sun, T., Miao, L., Li, Q. et al. Production of lycopene by metabolically-engineered Escherichia coli . Biotechnol Lett 36, 1515–1522 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10529-014-1543-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10529-014-1543-0