Systems engineering of Escherichia coli for n-butane production

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Electronic versions

  • Yilan Liu
    University of Toronto
  • Anna Khusnutdinova
    Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry University of Toronto Toronto CanadaUniversity of Toronto
  • Jinjin Chen
    University of Toronto
  • David Crisante
    University of Toronto
  • Khorcheska Batyrova
    University of Toronto
  • Kaushik Raj
    University of Toronto
  • Michelle Feigis
    University of Toronto
  • Erfan Shirzadi
    University of Toronto
  • Xiaotong Wang
    University of Toronto
  • Roham Dorakhan
    University of Toronto
  • Xue Wang
    University of Toronto
  • Peter J Stogios
    University of Toronto
  • Alexander F Yakunin
  • Edward H Sargent
    University of Toronto
  • Radhakrishnan Mahadevan
    University of Toronto

Rising concerns about climate change and sustainable energy have attracted efforts towards developing environmentally friendly alternatives to fossil fuels. Biosynthesis of n-butane, a highly desirable petro-chemical, fuel additive and diluent in the oil industry, remains a challenge. In this work, we first engineered enzymes Tes, Car and AD in the termination module to improve the selectivity of n-butane biosynthesis, and ancestral reconstruction and a synthetic RBS significantly improved the AD abundance. Next, we did ribosome binding site (RBS) calculation to identify potential metabolic bottlenecks, and then mitigated the bottleneck with RBS engineering and precursor propionyl-CoA addition. Furthermore, we employed a model-assisted strain design and a nonrepetitive extra-long sgRNA arrays (ELSAs) and quorum sensing assisted CRISPRi to facilitate a dynamic two-stage fermentation. Through systems engineering, n-butane production was increased by 168-fold from 0.04 to 6.74 mg/L. Finally, the maximum n-butane production from acetate was predicted using parsimonious flux balance analysis (pFBA), and we achieved n-butane production from acetate produced by electrocatalytic CO reduction. Our findings pave the way for selectively producing n-butane from renewable carbon source.

Keywords

  • Escherichia coli/genetics, Metabolic Engineering, Butanes/metabolism, Acetates/metabolism
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)98-107
Number of pages10
JournalMetabolic Engineering
Volume74
Early online date12 Oct 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2022
View graph of relations