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Metabolic engineering of vitamin C production in Arabidopsis

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Abstract

Vitamin C (L-ascorbic acid, AsA) is a compound which provides major nutritional value, both for plants and humans. In this study, three distinct metabolic engineering strategies, including overexpression of biosynthesis enzyme, suppression of catabolism enzyme and switching the sub-cellular localization of compartment enzyme, were employed to enhance the production of AsA in Arabidopsis thaliana. The results showed that (1) overexpression of L-Galactose-1-P Phosphatase (GalPPase) enhanced AsA content to 3.96 µmol/g FW, which was 1.6-fold more than that in their wild-type (WT) counterparts; (2) RNAi suppression of ascorbate oxidase (AO) resulted in a significant increase of AsA accumulation (0.86 µmol/g FW) in apoplast; (3) both mitochondrion-target and none-target overexpression of L-Galactose dehydrogenase (GalDH) did not significantly promote AsA production compared with WT (1.96 µmol/g), however a dramatic enhancement was observed following infiltration with L-galactono-1, 4-lactone (L-GalL), both in transgenic and WT plants. The best line produced AsA with the content of 3.90 µmol/g FW, which was about 2-fold of that in the untreated control (1.99 µmol/g FW). This study provides new strategies including GalPPase overexpression, AO suppression as well as L-GalL feeding for modern breeding aimed at stimulating the AsA content in plants.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pharmaceutical Botany, School of Pharmacy, Second Military Medical University, Shanghai, 200-433, China

    Ling Xiao, Hexin Tan & Lei Zhang

  2. Department of Pharmacy, Changzheng Hospital, Second Military Medical University, Shanghai, China

    Ying Xiao

  3. Institute of Chinese Materia Medica, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shanghai, China

    Ying Xiao

  4. State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering, School of Life Sciences, Fudan-SJTU-Nottingham Plant Biotechnology R&D Center, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200-433, China

    Zinan Wang

  5. Plant Biotechnology Research Center, SJTU-Cornell Institute of Sustainable Agriculture and Biotechnology, Fudan-SJTU-Nottingham Plant Biotechnology R&D Center, School of Agriculture and Biology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Kexuan Tang

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  1. Ling Xiao
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Correspondence to Kexuan Tang or Lei Zhang.

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These two authors contributed equally to this work

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Xiao, L., Xiao, Y., Wang, Z. et al. Metabolic engineering of vitamin C production in Arabidopsis . Biotechnol Bioproc E 20, 677–684 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12257-015-0090-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12257-015-0090-4

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