Improvement of the Production Efficiency of l-(+)-Tartaric Acid by Heterogeneous Whole-Cell Bioconversion

Development of highly efficient whole-cell catalysts of cis-epoxysuccinic acid hydrolase by surface display

Bacterial cis-epoxysuccinic acid hydrolases (CESHs) are intracellular enzymes used in the industrial production of enantiomeric tartaric acids. The enzymes are mainly used as whole-cell catalysts because of the low stability of purified CESHs. However, the low cell permeability is the major drawback of the whole-cell catalyst. To overcome this problem, we developed whole-cell catalysts using various surface display systems for CESH[L] which produces L(+)-tartaric acid. Considering that the display efficiency depends on both the carrier and the passenger, we screened five different anchoring motifs in Escherichia coli. Display efficiencies are significantly different among these five systems and the InaPbN-CESH[L] system has the highest whole-cell enzymatic activity. Conditions for InaPbN-CESH[L] production were optimized and a maturation step was discovered which can increase the whole-cell activity several times. After optimization, the total activity of the InaPbN-CESH[L] surface display system is higher than the total lysate activity of an intracellular CESH[L] overexpression system, indicating a very high CESH[L] display level. Furthermore, the whole-cell InaPbN-CESH[L] biocatalyst exhibited good storage stability at 4 °C and considerable reusability. Thereby, an efficient whole-cell CESH[L] biocatalyst was developed in this study, which solves the cell permeability problem and provides a valuable system for industrial L(+)-tartaric acid production.

Enantiomeric Tartaric Acid Production Using cis-Epoxysuccinate Hydrolase: History and Perspectives

Tartaric acid is an important chiral chemical building block with broad industrial and scientific applications. The enantioselective synthesis of l(+)- and d(−)-tartaric acids has been successfully achieved using bacteria presenting cis-epoxysuccinate hydrolase (CESH) activity, while the catalytic mechanisms of CESHs were not elucidated clearly until very recently. As biocatalysts, CESHs are unique epoxide hydrolases because their substrate is a small, mirror-symmetric, highly hydrophilic molecule, and their products show very high enantiomeric purity with nearly 100% enantiomeric excess. In this paper, we review over forty years of the history, process and mechanism studies of CESHs as well as our perspective on the future research and applications of CESH in enantiomeric tartaric acid production.

Production of tartaric acid using immobilized recominant cis-epoxysuccinate hydrolase

OBJECTIVE

To investigate the expression and immobilization of recombinant cis-epoxysuccinate hydrolase (ESH), and its application in the biological production of L-(+)-tartaric acid.

RESULTS

E. coli BL21 (DE3)/pET11a-ESH (His) was engineered to express recombinant ESH. The enzyme had an activity of 262 U mg^-1. The recombinant ESH was immobilized on agarose Ni-IDA matrix with metal ion affinity interaction to improve its thermostability and pH stability. The immobilization efficiency and activity yield were 94 and 95%, respectively. The specific catalytic efficiency of immobilized ESH was 104 mg U^-1 h^-1 during the continuous enzymatic production process.

CONCLUSION

ESH with a histidine tag was immobilized and used for the continuous production of L-(+)-tartaric acid.

Bioresolution of racemic phenyl glycidyl ether by a putative recombinant epoxide hydrolase from Streptomyces griseus NBRC 13350

In order to produce enantiomerically pure epoxides for the synthesis of value-added chemicals, a novel putative epoxide hydrolase (EH) sgeh was cloned and overexpressed in pET28a/Escherichia coli BL21(DE3). The 1047 bp sgeh gene was mined from Streptomyces griseus NBRC 13350 genome sequence. The recombinant hexahistidyl-tagged SGEH was purified (16.6-fold) by immobilized metal-affinity chromatography, with 90% yield as a homodimer of 100 kDa. The recombinant E. coli whole cells overexpressing SGEH could kinetically resolve racemic phenyl glycidyl ether (PGE) into (R)-PGE with 98% ee, 40% yield, and enantiomeric ratio (E) of 20. This was achieved under the optimized reaction conditions i.e. cell/substrate ratio of 20:1 (w/w) at pH 7.5 and 20 °C in 10% (v/v) dimethylformamide (DMF) in a 10 h reaction. 99% enantiopure (R)-PGE was obtained when the reaction time was prolonged to 12 h with a yield of 34%. In conclusion, an economically viable and environment friendly green process for the production of enantiopure (R)-PGE was developed by using wet cells of E. coli expressing recombinant SGEH.