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Pathway engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for efficient lycopene production

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Abstract

To construct a Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain for efficient lycopene production, we used a pathway engineering strategy based on expression modules comprising fusion proteins and a strong constitutive promoter. The two recombinant plasmids pEBI encoding the fusion genes with an inducible promoter, as well as pIETB with a constitutive promoter and terminator were introduced into S. cerevisiae YPH499 and BY4741 to obtain the four recombinant strains ypEBI, ypIETB, byEBI and byIETB. The lycopene production and the transcription levels of key genes were higher in the BY4741 chassis than in YPH499. Accordingly, the content of total and unsaturated fatty acids was also higher in BY4741, which also exhibited a decrease of glucose, increase of trehalose, increase of metabolite in citrate cycle, and low levels of amino acids. These changes rerouted metabolic fluxes toward lycopene synthesis, indicating that the BY4741 chassis was more suitable for lycopene synthesis. The lycopene content of bpIETB in SG-Leu medium supplemented with 100 mg/L of linolenic acid reached 10.12 mg/g dry cell weight (DCW), which was 85.7% higher than without the addition of unsaturated fatty acids. The constitutive promoter expression strategy employed in this study achieved efficient lycopene synthesis in S. cerevisiae, and the strain bpIETB was obtained a suitable chassis host for lycopene production, which provides a basis for further optimization of lycopene production in artificial synthetic cells and a reference for the multi-enzyme synthesis of other similar complex terpenoids.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21978136), the National Natural Science Foundation of China Youth Fund (31922070), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20180038, BK20171461), and Basic Scientific R&D Program for Public Welfare Institutes in Xinjiang (KY2019023).

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Food Science and Pharmaceutical Engineering, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210046, Jiangsu, China

    Xian Xu, Jie Liu, Yongling Lu & Haiquan Lan

  2. State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, College of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, 211816, Jiangsu, China

    Liqing Tian

  3. Institute of Microbiology, Xinjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Urumqi, 830091, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China

    Zhidong Zhang

  4. School of Chemical Engineering, Yangzhou Polytechnic Institute, Yangzhou, 225127, Jiangsu, China

    Chengjia Xie

  5. College of Food Science and Light Industry, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, 211816, Jiangsu, China

    Ling Jiang

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  1. Xian Xu
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Xu, X., Liu, J., Lu, Y. et al. Pathway engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for efficient lycopene production. Bioprocess Biosyst Eng 44, 1033–1047 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-020-02503-5

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