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Metabolic engineering for the production of l-phenylalanine in Escherichia coli

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Abstract

As one of the three proteinogenic aromatic amino acids, l-phenylalanine is widely applied in the food, chemical and pharmaceutical industries, especially in production of the low-calorie sweetener aspartame. Microbial production of l-phenylalanine has become attractive as it possesses the advantages of environmental friendliness, low cost, and feedstock renewability. With the progress of metabolic engineering, systems biology and synthetic biology, production of l-phenylalanine from glucose in Escherichia coli with relatively high titer has been achieved by improving the intracellular levels of precursors, alleviating transcriptional repression and feedback inhibition of key enzymes, increasing the export of l-phenylalanine, engineering of global regulators, and overexpression of rate-limiting enzymes. In this review, successful metabolic engineering strategies for increasing l-phenylalanine accumulation from glucose in E. coli are described. In addition, perspectives for further improvement of production of l-phenylalanine are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31600066, 31870105, 31741007), the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (ZR2016CB20, ZR2016CL02), and the State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology Open Projects Fund (M2016-10).

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  1. School of Biological Science and Technology, University of Jinan, Jinan, 250022, People’s Republic of China

    Xiaozhen Liu, Hao Niu, Qiang Li & Pengfei Gu

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  1. Xiaozhen Liu
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  2. Hao Niu
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Correspondence to Pengfei Gu.

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Liu, X., Niu, H., Li, Q. et al. Metabolic engineering for the production of l-phenylalanine in Escherichia coli. 3 Biotech 9, 85 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-019-1619-6

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