Abstract
Concerns about energy security and global petroleum supply have made the production of renewable biofuels an industrial imperative. The ideal biofuels are n-alkanes in that they are chemically and structurally identical to the fossil fuels and can “drop in” to the transportation infrastructure. In this work, an Escherichia coli strain that produces n-alkanes was constructed by heterologous expression of acyl-acyl carrier protein (ACP) reductase (AAR) and aldehyde deformylating oxygenase (ADO) from Synechococcus elongatus PCC7942. The accumulation of alkanes ranged from 3.1 to 24.0 mg/L using different expressing strategies. Deletion of yqhD, an inherent aldehyde reductase in E. coli, or overexpression of fadR, an activator for fatty acid biosynthesis, exhibited a nearly twofold increase in alkane titers, respectively. Combining yqhD deletion and fadR overexpression resulted in a production titer of 255.6 mg/L in E. coli, and heptadecene was the most abundant product.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31170040, 31200081) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (KGZD-EW-606).
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Song, X., Yu, H. & Zhu, K. Improving alkane synthesis in Escherichia coli via metabolic engineering. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 100, 757–767 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-015-7026-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-015-7026-y