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Enhancing ectoine production by recombinant Escherichia coli through step-wise fermentation optimization strategy based on kinetic analysis

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Abstract

In this study, the recombinant ectoine-producing Escherichia coli ET01 was constructed by introducing the ectABC operon from Halomonas venusta ZH. To further improve ectoine production, the regulation of the fermentation process was systematically investigated. First, the effects of the initial glucose concentrations and glucose feeding mode on ectoine production were analyzed. Using a combination of pH-feedback feeding and glucose-controlled feeding, the ectoine titer reached 25.5 g/L, representing an 8.8-fold increase over standard batch culture. Then, the effects of dissolved oxygen (DO) levels (50, 40, 30, or 20%) on ectoine production were studied, and a DO control strategy was developed based on the fermentation kinetics. When the final optimized two-stage fermentation strategy was used, the ectoine titer reached 47.8 g/L, which was the highest level of ectoine produced by E. coli fermentation. The fermentation regulation strategy developed in this study might be useful for scaling up the commercial production of ectoine.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2019YFA0905203), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21776133), the Jiangsu Synergetic Innovation Center for Advanced Bio-Manufacture (No. XTB1804).

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  1. Yingsheng Dong and Hao Zhang authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, 211816, People’s Republic of China

    Yingsheng Dong, Hao Zhang, Hong Xu & Sha Li

  2. College of Food Science and Light Industry, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, 211816, People’s Republic of China

    Yingsheng Dong, Hao Zhang, XinYi Wang, JunJie Ma, Peng Lei, Hong Xu & Sha Li

  3. Jiangsu National Synergetic Innovation Center for Advanced Materials, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China

    Hong Xu

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  1. Yingsheng Dong
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Dong, Y., Zhang, H., Wang, X. et al. Enhancing ectoine production by recombinant Escherichia coli through step-wise fermentation optimization strategy based on kinetic analysis. Bioprocess Biosyst Eng 44, 1557–1566 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-021-02541-7

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