BackgroundMicrobial formation of acetone, isopropanol, and butanol is largely restricted to bacteria belonging to the genus Clostridium. This ability has been industrially exploited over the last 100 years. The solvents are important feedstocks for the chemical and biofuel industry. However, biological synthesis suffers from high substrate costs and competition from chemical synthesis supported by the low price of crude oil. To render the biotechnological production economically viable again, improvements in microbial and fermentation performance are necessary. However, no comprehensive comparisons of respective species and strains used and their specific abilities exist today.ResultsThe genomes of a total 30 saccharolytic Clostridium strains, representative of the species Clostridium acetobutylicum, C. aurantibutyricum, C. beijerinckii, C. diolis, C. felsineum, C. pasteurianum, C. puniceum, C. roseum, C. saccharobutylicum, and C. saccharoperbutylacetonicum, have been determined; 10 of them completely, and compared to 14 published genomes of other solvent-forming clostridia. Two major groups could be differentiated and several misclassified species were detected.ConclusionsOur findings represent a comprehensive study of phylogeny and taxonomy of clostridial solvent producers that highlights differences in energy conservation mechanisms and substrate utilization between strains, and allow for the first time a direct comparison of sequentially selected industrial strains at the genetic level. Detailed data mining is now possible, supporting the identification of new engineering targets for improved solvent production.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13068-017-0742-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

An operon comprising two genes, CA_P0037 and CA_P0036, that encode proteins of unknown function that were previously shown to be highly expressed in acidogenic cells and repressed in solventogenic and alcohologenic cells is located on the pSOL1 megaplasmid of Clostridium acetobutylicum upstream of adhE2. A CA_P0037::int (189/190s) mutant in which an intron was inserted at position 189/190 in the sense strand of CA_P0037 was successfully generated by the Targetron technique. The resultant mutant showed significantly different metabolic flux patterns in acidogenic (producing mainly lactate, butyrate, and butanol) and alcohologenic (producing mainly butyrate, acetate, and lactate) chemostat cultures but not in solventogenic or batch cultures. Transcriptomic investigation of the CA_P0037::int (189/190s) mutant showed that inactivation of CA_P0037 significantly affected the expression of more than 258 genes under acidogenic conditions. Surprisingly, genes belonging to the Fur regulon, involved in iron transport (CA_C1029-CA_C1032), or coding for the main flavodoxin (CA_C0587) were the most significantly expressed genes under all conditions, whereas fur (coding for the ferric uptake regulator) gene expression remained unchanged. Furthermore, most of the genes of the Rex regulon, such as the adhE2 and ldhA genes, and of the PerR regulon, such as rbr3A-rbr3B and dfx, were overexpressed in the mutant. In addition, the whole CA_P0037-CA_P0036 operon was highly expressed under all conditions in the CA_P0037::int (189/190s) mutant, suggesting a self-regulated expression mechanism. Cap0037 was shown to bind to the CA_P0037-CA_P0036 operon, sol operon, and adc promoters, and the binding sites were determined by DNA footprinting. Finally, a putative Cap0037 regulon was generated using a bioinformatic approach.

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