Metabolic engineering of Bacillus subtilis for chiral pure meso-2,3-butanediol production.
BACKGROUND
2,3-Butanediol (2,3-BD) with low toxicity to microbes, could be a promising alternative for biofuel production. However, most of the 2,3-BD producers are opportunistic pathogens that are not suitable for industrial-scale fermentation. In our previous study, wild-type Bacillus subtilis 168, as a class I microorganism, was first found to generate only d-(-)-2,3-BD (purity >99 %) under low oxygen conditions.


RESULTS
In this work, B. subtilis was engineered to produce chiral pure meso-2,3-BD. First, d-(-)-2,3-BD production was abolished by deleting d-(-)-2,3-BD dehydrogenase coding gene bdhA, and acoA gene was knocked out to prevent the degradation of acetoin (AC), the immediate precursor of 2,3-BD. Next, both pta and ldh gene were deleted to decrease the accumulation of the byproducts, acetate and l-lactate. We further introduced the meso-2,3-BD dehydrogenase coding gene budC from Klebsiella pneumoniae CICC10011, as well as overexpressed alsSD in the tetra-mutant (ΔacoAΔbdhAΔptaΔldh) to achieve the efficient production of chiral meso-2,3-BD. Finally, the pool of NADH availability was further increased to facilitate the conversion of meso-2,3-BD from AC by overexpressing udhA gene (coding a soluble transhydrogenase) and low dissolved oxygen control during the cultivation. Under microaerobic oxygen conditions, the best strain BSF9 produced 103.7 g/L meso-2,3-BD with a yield of 0.487 g/g glucose in the 5-L batch fermenter, and the titer of the main byproduct AC was no more than 1.1 g/L.


CONCLUSIONS
This work offered a novel strategy for the production of chiral pure meso-2,3-BD in B. subtilis. To our knowledge, this is the first report indicating that metabolic engineered B. subtilis could produce chiral meso-2,3-BD with high purity under limited oxygen conditions. These results further demonstrated that B. subtilis as a class I microorganism is a competitive industrial-level meso-2,3-BD producer.
Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering (Ministry of Education); SynBio Research Platform, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072 People's Republic of China.
Jing
J
Fu
Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering (Ministry of Education); SynBio Research Platform, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072 People's Republic of China.
Guangxin
G
Huo
Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering (Ministry of Education); SynBio Research Platform, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072 People's Republic of China.
Lili
L
Feng
Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering (Ministry of Education); SynBio Research Platform, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072 People's Republic of China.
Yufeng
Y
Mao
Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering (Ministry of Education); SynBio Research Platform, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072 People's Republic of China.
Zhiwen
Z
Wang
Key Laboratory of Systems Microbial Biotechnology, Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianjin, 300308 People's Republic of China.
Hongwu
H
Ma
Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering (Ministry of Education); SynBio Research Platform, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072 People's Republic of China.|Key Laboratory of Fermentation Engineering (Ministry of Education), Hubei Provincial Cooperative Innovation Center of Industrial Fermentation, Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan, 430068 China.
Tao
T
Chen
Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering (Ministry of Education); SynBio Research Platform, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072 People's Republic of China.
Xueming
X
Zhao
Bacillus subtilis; Cofactor engineering; Meso-2,3-butanediol; Metabolic engineering; d-(−)-2,3-butanediol