Engineering Escherichia coli coculture systems for the production of biochemical products

Engineering microbial consortia to express complex biosynthetic pathways efficiently for the production of valuable compounds is a promising approach for metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. Here, we report the design, optimization, and scale-up of an Escherichia coli-E. coli coculture that...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Haoran, Li, Zhengjun, Stephanopoulos, Gregory, Pereira, Brian J.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/101117
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7059-572X
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6909-4568
Description
Summary:Engineering microbial consortia to express complex biosynthetic pathways efficiently for the production of valuable compounds is a promising approach for metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. Here, we report the design, optimization, and scale-up of an Escherichia coli-E. coli coculture that successfully overcomes fundamental microbial production limitations, such as high-level intermediate secretion and low-efficiency sugar mixture utilization. For the production of the important chemical cis,cis-muconic acid, we show that the coculture approach achieves a production yield of 0.35 g/g from a glucose/xylose mixture, which is significantly higher than reported in previous reports. By efficiently producing another compound, 4-hydroxybenzoic acid, we also demonstrate that the approach is generally applicable for biosynthesis of other important industrial products.