The oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica has a tendency to use the non‐homologous end joining repair (NHEJ) over the homology directed recombination as double‐strand breaks (DSB) repair system, making it difficult to edit the genome using homologous recombination. A recently developed Target‐AID (activation‐induced cytidine deaminase) base editor, designed to recruit cytidine deaminase (CDA) to the target DNA locus via the CRISPR/Cas9 system, can directly induce C to T mutation without DSB and donor DNA. In this study, this system is adopted in Y. lipolytica for multiplex gene disruption. Target‐specific gRNA(s) and a fusion protein consisting of a nickase Cas9, pmCDA1, and uracil DNA glycosylase inhibitor are expressed from a single plasmid to disrupt target genes by introducing a stop codon via C to T mutation within the mutational window. Deletion of the KU70 gene involved in the NHEJ prevents the generation of indels by base excision repair following cytidine deamination, increasing the accuracy of genome editing. Using this Target‐AID system with optimized expression levels of the base editor, single gene disruption and simultaneous double gene disruption are achieved with the efficiencies up to 94% and 31%, respectively, demonstrating this base editing system as a convenient genome editing tool in Y. lipolytica.

Bacterial cytochrome P450 enzymes in cytochrome P450 (CYP)153 family were recently reported as fatty acid ω-hydroxylase. Among them, CYP153As from Marinobacter aquaeolei VT8 (CYP153A33), Alcanivorax borkumensis SK2 (CYP153A13), and Gordonia alkanivorans (CYP153A35) were selected, and their specific activities and product yields of ω-hydroxy palmitic acid based on whole cell reactions toward palmitic acid were compared. Using CamAB as redox partner, CYP153A35 and CYP153A13 showed the highest product yields of ω-hydroxy palmitic acid in whole cell and in vitro reactions, respectively. Artificial self-sufficient CYP153A35-BMR was constructed by fusing it to the reductase domain of CYP102A1 (i.e., BM3) from Bacillus megaterium, and its catalytic activity was compared with CYP153A35 and CamAB systems. Unexpectedly, the system with CamAB resulted in a 1.5-fold higher yield of ω-hydroxy palmitic acid than that using A35-BMR in whole cell reactions, whereas the electron coupling efficiency of CYP153A35-BM3 reductase was 4-fold higher than that of CYP153A35 and CamAB system. Furthermore, various CamAB expression systems according to gene arrangements of the three proteins and promoter strength in their gene expression were compared in terms of product yields and productivities. Tricistronic expression of the three proteins in the order of putidaredoxin (CamB), CYP153A35, and putidaredoxin reductase (CamA), i.e., A35-AB2, showed the highest product yield from 5 mM palmitic acid for 9 h in batch reaction owing to the concentration of CamB, which is the rate-limiting factor for the activity of CYP153A35. However, in fed-batch reaction, A35-AB1, which expressed the three proteins individually using three T7 promoters, resulted with the highest product yield of 17.0 mM (4.6 g/L) ω-hydroxy palmitic acid from 20 mM (5.1 g/L) palmitic acid for 30 h.

A major problem of long-chain fatty acid (LCFA) hydroxylation using Escherichia coli is that FadD (long-chain fatty acyl-CoA synthetase), which is necessary for exogenous LCFA transport, also initiates cellular consumption of LCFA. In this study, an effective method to prevent the cellular consumption of LCFA without impairing its transport is proposed. The main idea is that a heterologous enzyme which consumes LCFA can replace FadD in LCFA transport. For the model heterologous enzyme, CYP153A from Marinobacter aquaeolei, which converts palmitic acid into ω-hydroxy palmitic acid, was expressed in E. coli. When fadD was deleted from an E. coli strain, CYP153A indeed maintained the ability to transport LCFA. A disadvantage of fadD deletion mutant is the fact that FadD deficiency downregulates the transcription of fadL (outer membrane LCFA transporter) via FadR (fatty acid metabolism regulator protein), was solved by fadL overexpression from a plasmid. In addition, the overexpression of fadL was able to offset catabolite repression on fadL, allowing glucose to be used as the primary carbon source. In conclusion, the strain with fadD deletion and fadL overexpression showed 5.5-fold increase in productivity compared to the wild-type strain, converting 2.6 g/L (10.0 mM) of palmitic acid into 2.4 g/L (8.8 mM) of ω-hydroxy palmitic acid in a shake flask. This simple genetic manipulation can be applied to any LCFA hydroxylation using E. coli.

Background Yarrowia lipolytica , an oleaginous yeast, is a promising platform strain for production of biofuels and oleochemicals as it can accumulate a high level of lipids in response to nitrogen limitation. Accordingly, many metabolic engineering efforts have been made to develop engineered strains of Y. lipolytica with higher lipid yields. Genome-scale model of metabolism (GEM) is a powerful tool for identifying novel genetic designs for metabolic engineering. Several GEMs for Y. lipolytica have recently been developed; however, not many applications of the GEMs have been reported for actual metabolic engineering of Y. lipolytica . The major obstacle impeding the application of Y. lipolytica GEMs is the lack of proper methods for predicting phenotypes of the cells in the nitrogen-limited condition, or more specifically in the stationary phase of a batch culture. Results In this study, we showed that environmental version of minimization of metabolic adjustment (eMOMA) can be used for predicting metabolic flux distribution of Y. lipolytica under the nitrogen-limited condition and identifying metabolic engineering strategies to improve lipid production in Y. lipolytica . Several well-characterized overexpression targets, such as diglyceride acyltransferase, acetyl-CoA carboxylase, and stearoyl-CoA desaturase, were successfully rediscovered by our eMOMA-based design method, showing the relevance of prediction results. Interestingly, the eMOMA-based design method also suggested non-intuitive knockout targets, and we experimentally validated the prediction with a mutant lacking YALI0F30745g, one of the predicted targets involved in one-carbon/methionine metabolism. The mutant accumulated 45% more lipids compared to the wild-type. Conclusion This study demonstrated that eMOMA is a powerful computational method for understanding and engineering the metabolism of Y. lipolytica and potentially other oleaginous microorganisms. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s13068-019-1518-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Multi-enzymatic cascade reaction systems were designed to generate biopolymer monomers using Escherichia coli-based cell modules, capable of carrying out one-pot reactions. Three cell-based modules, including a ω-hydroxylation module (Cell-Hm) to...

2'-Fucosyllactose (2'-FL) is the most abundant oligosaccharide in human milk and one of the most actively studied human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). When 2'-FL is produced through biological production using a microorganism, like Escherichia coli, D-lactose is often externally fed as an acceptor substrate for fucosyltransferase (FT). When D-glucose is used as a carbon source for the cell growth and D-lactose is transported by lactose permease (LacY) in lac operon, D-lactose transport is under the control of catabolite repression (CR), limiting the supply of D-lactose for FT reaction in the cell, hence decreasing the production of 2'-FL. In this study, a remarkable increase of 2'-FL production was achieved by relieving the CR from the lac operon of the host E. coli BL21 and introducing adequate site-specific mutations into α-1,2-FT (FutC) for enhancement of catalytic activity and solubility. For the host engineering, the native lac promoter (P lac ) was substituted for tac promoter (P tac ), so that the lac operon could be turned on, but not subjected to CR by high D-glucose concentration. Next, for protein engineering of FutC, family multiple sequence analysis for conserved amino acid sequences and protein-ligand substrate docking analysis led us to find several mutation sites, which could increase the solubility of FutC and its activity. As a result, a combination of four mutation sites (F40S/ Q150H/C151R/Q239S) was identified as the best candidate, and the quadruple mutant of FutC enhanced 2'-FL titer by 2.4-fold. When the above-mentioned E. coli mutant host transformed with the quadruple mutant of futC was subjected to fedbatch culture, 40 g l −1 of 2'-FL titer was achieved with the productivity of 0.55 g l −1 h −1 and the specific 2'-FL yield of 1.0 g g −1 dry cell weight.

CYP153A35 from Gordonia alkanivorans was recently characterized as fatty acid ω-hydroxylase. To enhance the catalytic activity of CYP153A35 toward palmitic acid, site-directed saturation mutagenesis was attempted using a semi-rational approach that combined structure-based computational analysis and subsequent saturation mutagenesis. Using colorimetric high-throughput screening (HTS) method based on O-demethylation activity of P450, CYP153A35 D131S and D131F mutants were selected. The best mutant, D131S, having a single mutation on BC-loop, showed 13- and 17-fold improvement in total turnover number (TTN) and catalytic efficiency (k /K) toward palmitic acid compared to wild-type, respectively. However, in whole-cell reaction, D131S mutant showed only 50% improvement in ω-hydroxylated palmitic acid yield compared to the wild type. Docking simulation studies explained that the effect of D131S mutation on the catalytic activity would be mainly caused by the binding pose of fatty acids in the substrate access tunnel of the enzyme. This effect of D131S mutation on the catalytic activity is synergistic with that of the mutations in the active site previously reported.

Heterotrophic oleaginous microorganisms continue to draw interest as they can accumulate a large amount of lipids which is a promising feedstock for the production of biofuels and oleochemicals. Nutrient limitation, especially nitrogen limitation, is known to effectively trigger the lipid production in these microorganisms. For the aim of developing improved strains, the mechanisms behind the lipid production have been studied for a long time. Nowadays, system-level understanding of their metabolism and associated metabolic switches is attainable with modern systems biology tools. This work reviews the systems biology studies, based on (i) top-down, large-scale 'omics' tools, and (ii) bottom-up, mathematical modeling methods, on the heterotrophic oleaginous microorganisms with an emphasis on further application to metabolic engineering.