Background: Norvaline is an unusual non-proteinogenic branched-chain amino acid which has been of interest especially during the early enzymological studies on regulatory mutants of the branched-chain amino acid pathway in Serratia marcescens. Only recently norvaline and other modified amino acids of the branched-chain amino acid synthesis pathway got attention again when they were found to be incorporated in minor amounts in heterologous proteins with a high leucine or methionine content. Earlier experiments have convincingly shown that norvaline and norleucine are formed from pyruvate being an alternative substrate of α-isopropylmalate synthase, however so far norvaline accumulation was not shown to occur in non-recombinant strains of E. coli.

SummaryBackground: Escherichia coli induces the heat shock response to a temperature up-shift which is connected to the synthesis of a characteristic set of proteins, including ATP dependent chaperones and proteases. Therefore the balance of the nucleotide pool is important for the adaptation and continuous function of the cell. Whereas it has been observed in eukaryotic cells, that the ATP level immediately decreased after the temperature shift, no data are available for E. coli about the adenosine nucleotide levels during the narrow time range of minutes after a temperature up-shift.

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Bioprocess scale-down simulators are used to investigate the phenomena occurring in industrial scale cultivations. The aim is to simulate the large-scale conditions, characterized by long mixing times introducing local gradients into the bioreactor, in laboratory scale bioreactor. We have expanded the current physiological knowledge about the consequences of such cultivation conditions from well-known mixedacid fermentation to amino acid metabolism. Several interesting deviations were observed for amino acids derived from pyruvate when a STR-PFR scale-down simulator and a regular STR fed-batch cultivation were compared. In this article we show that the cultivation of Escherichia coli K-12 substrain W3110 in a scale-down two-compartment bioreactor has consequences on the free amino acid pools. Repeated occurrence of high glucose zones affects the biosynthesis of amino acids derived from pyruvate. This is interesting since the pyruvate based amino acids are precursors of the branched chain amino acid pathway, which is further disturbed by an unbalanced regulation caused by a frameshift mutation in the ilvG gene of E. coli K-12 strains. As a consequence the formation of non-typical amino acid norvaline was detected in the two compartment bioreactor cultivation.

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