Recent advances in metabolic engineering of Corynebacterium glutamicum for bioproduction of value-added aromatic chemicals and natural products

Abstract

Recent progress in synthetic and systems metabolic engineering technologies has explored the potential of microbial cell factories for the production of industrially relevant bulk and fine chemicals from renewable biomass resources in an eco-friendly manner. Corynebacterium glutamicum, a workhorse for industrial amino acid production, has currently evolved into a promising microbial platform for bioproduction of various natural and non-natural chemicals from renewable feedstocks. Notably, it has been recently demonstrated that metabolically engineered C. glutamicum can overproduce several commercially valuable aromatic and related chemicals such as shikimate, 4-hydroxybenzoate, and 4-aminobenzoate from sugars at remarkably high titer suitable to commercial application. On the other hand, overexpression and/or extension of its endogenous metabolic pathways by integrating heterologous metabolic pathways enabled production of structurally intricate and valuable natural chemicals like plant polyphenols, carotenoids, and fatty acids. In this review, we summarize recent advances in metabolic engineering of C. glutamicum for production of those value-added aromatics and other natural products, which highlights high potential and the versatility of this microbe for bioproduction of diverse chemicals.

Bioenergy and Biorefinery: Feedstock, Biotechnological Conversion, and Products

“…Corynebacterium also has a great potential to produce amino acids required for food and pharmaceutical applications. The current stage of metabolic engineering technology enables this microbe to produce a variety of biochemicals beyond classical amino acids from renewable substrates . Saccharomyces cerevisiae ( S. cerevisiae ) is the most widely used yeast for biotechnological applications and it is regularly employed at an industrial scale to produce biochemicals and biofuels.…”

Identification and Microbial Production of the Raspberry Phenol Salidroside that Is Active against Huntington’s Disease

“…We decided to also establish the biosynthetic route to salidroside in C. glutamicum as this organism, already used for the million ton-scale production of the amino acids such as L-Glu and L-Lys, is characterized by a high tolerance toward toxic aromatic compounds (Kitade et al, 2018;Kogure and Inui, 2018). Not surprisingly, several C. glutamicum strains for the synthesis of aromatic plant natural products (Kallscheuer et al, 2016(Kallscheuer et al, , 2017Braga et al, 2018) and aromatic amino acids as their precursor molecules are available (Ikeda, 2006), rendering this prokaryotic platform organism a suitable alternative to yeast for salidroside production.…”

Recent Advances of L-ornithine Biosynthesis in Metabolically Engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum

“…Currently, most amino acids are produced by microbial fermentation, a technique adopted in Japan several decades ago. Microbial fermentation is an eco-friendly technology, which can address the growing concerns about environmental issues and can be used to establish a sustainable economy independent of fossil fuels (Becker et al, 2018;Kogure and Inui, 2018). L-ornithine, a non-protein amino acid, is widely used to improve human health as it is reported to have beneficial effects on the liver and the heart (Acharya et al, 2009;Rathi and Taneja, 2018;Butterworth and McPhail, 2019).…”