ASIA: An automated stress‐inducible adaptor for enhanced stress protein expression in engineered Escherichia coli

Abstract

Orthogonal T7 RNA polymerase (T7RNAP) and T7 promoter is a potent technique for protein expression in broad cells, but the energy requirements associated with this method impede the growth, leading to cell lysis when dealing with toxic and stress proteins. A Lemo21(DE3) strain denoted as L21 offers a solution by fine‐tuning T7RNAP levels under rhamnose to induce T7 lysozyme (LysY) and enhance the protein production, but it requires optimization of inducer concentration, cultural temperature, and condition, even the types of carbon sources. Herein, we construct an automated stress‐inducible adaptor (ASIA) employing different stress‐inducible promoters from Escherichia coli. The ASIA system is designed to automatically regulate LysY expression in response to stress signals, thereby suppressing T7RNAP and amplifying the overexpression of stress protein cutinase ICCM. This approach fine‐tunes T7RNAP levels and outperforms L21 in various temperatures and carbon source conditions. The ASIAhtp strain maintains ICCM yield at 91.6 mg/g‐DCW even in the limiting carbon source at 1 g/L, which is 12‐fold higher in protein productivity compared to using L21. ASIA as a versatile and robust tool for enhancing overexpression of stress proteins in E. coli is expected to address more difficult proteins in the future.