Putrescine production by engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum

Abstract

Here, we report the engineering of the industrially relevant Corynebacterium glutamicum for putrescine production. C. glutamicum grew well in the presence of up to 500 mM of putrescine. A reduction of the growth rate by 34% and of biomass formation by 39% was observed at 750 mM of putrescine. C. glutamicum was enabled to produce putrescine by heterologous expression of genes encoding enzymes of the arginine- and ornithine decarboxylase pathways from Escherichia coli. The results showed that the putrescine yield by recombinant C. glutamicum strains provided with the arginine-decarboxylase pathway was 40 times lower than the yield by strains provided with the ornithine decarboxylase pathway. The highest production efficiency was reached by overexpression of speC, encoding the ornithine decarboxylase from E. coli, in combination with chromosomal deletion of genes encoding the arginine repressor ArgR and the ornithine carbamoyltransferase ArgF. In shake-flask batch cultures this strain produced putrescine up to 6 g/L with a space time yield of 0.1 g/L/h. The overall product yield was about 24 mol% (0.12 g/g of glucose).

Expanding the Regulatory Network Governed by the Extracytoplasmic Function Sigma Factor σHin Corynebacterium glutamicum

“…While C. glutamicum has been used in industrial production of the amino acids L-glutamate and L-lysine (1,2), recent studies demonstrate its use as a platform for microbial production of other valuable compounds, including organic acids, diamines, and biofuels (3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9). Furthermore, C. glutamicum is also important as a model organism for closely related pathogenic species, such as Corynebacterium diphtheriae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.…”

Complex Regulation of the Phosphoenolpyruvate Carboxykinase Gene pck and Characterization of Its GntR-Type Regulator IolR as a Repressor of myo-Inositol Utilization Genes in Corynebacterium glutamicum

“…Recent metabolic engineering studies have shown that C. glutamicum is also capable of producing a variety of other commercially interesting compounds, e.g., other L-amino acids (4), D-amino acids (5), organic acids such as succinate (6)(7)(8)(9), diamines such as cadaverine (10,11) or putrescine (12), biofuels such as ethanol or isobutanol (13)(14)(15), and proteins (16)(17)(18).…”

Arabitol Metabolism of Corynebacterium glutamicum and Its Regulation by AtlR

“…More recently, C. glutamicum has also been successfully engineered for the production of other compounds, e.g., putrescine and cadaverine (40,66), 2-ketoisovalerate (46), ethanol (37), isobutanol (12,68), and organic acids (58,59). The organism can use a variety of sugars (e.g., glucose, fructose, sucrose, ribose, or maltose) and organic acids (acetate, propionate, pyruvate, lactate, or citrate) as single or combined carbon and energy sources for growth and also for amino acid production.…”