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Coenzyme self-sufficiency system-recent advances in microbial production of high-value chemical phenyllactic acid

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Abstract

Phenyllactic acid (PLA), a natural antimicrobial substance, has many potential applications in the food, animal feed, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. However, its production is limited by the complex reaction steps involved in its chemical synthesis. Through advances in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology strategies, enzymatic or whole-cell catalysis was developed as an alternative method for PLA production. Herein, we review recent developments in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology strategies that promote the microbial production of high-value PLA. Specially, the advantages and disadvantages of the using of the three kinds of substrates, which includes phenylpyruvate, phenylalanine and glucose as starting materials by natural or engineered microbes is summarized. Notably, the bio-conversion of PLA often requires the consumption of expensive coenzyme NADH. To overcome the issues of NADH regeneration, efficiently internal cofactor regeneration systems constructed by co-expressing different enzyme combinations composed of lactate dehydrogenase with others for enhancing the PLA production, as well as their possible improvements, are discussed. In particular, the construction of fusion proteins with different linkers can achieve higher PLA yield and more efficient cofactor regeneration than that of multi-enzyme co-expression. Overall, this review provides a comprehensive overview of PLA biosynthesis pathways and strategies for increasing PLA yield through biotechnology, providing future directions for the large-scale commercial production of PLA and the expansion of downstream applications.

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Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFC2105700, 2021YFC2103300, 2021YFE0190800), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21978027), Scientific Research Foundation of State Key Lab of Coal Mine Disaster Dynamics and Control (2011DA105287-ZR202002), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2022CDJHLW006, 2020CDCGJ020, 2020CDCGHG068), Science and Technology Project of Traditional Chinese Medicine of Chongqing Health Committee (2020ZY023976), Chongqing Outstanding Youth Fund (cstc2021jcyj-jqX0013), and Youth Project of Science and Technology Research Program of Chongqing Education Commission of China (KJQN201900112).

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Authors and Affiliations

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Tinglan Li: Investigation, Writing – original draft, Data curation. Zhao Qin: Visualization, Software, Methodology, Formal analysis. Dan Wang: Supervision, Resources, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing. Xue Xia: Software, Methodology, Data curation. Xiaojie Zhou: Supervision, Data curation. Ge Hu: Supervision, Resources, Visualization, Conceptualization.

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Correspondence to Dan Wang.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Tinglan Li and Zhao Qin contributed equally to this work.

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Li, T., Qin, Z., Wang, D. et al. Coenzyme self-sufficiency system-recent advances in microbial production of high-value chemical phenyllactic acid. World J Microbiol Biotechnol 39, 36 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11274-022-03480-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11274-022-03480-5

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