Biosynthesis of Polyhydroxyalkanoates from 4-Ketovaleric Acid in Bacterial Cells. In: Cheng HN, Gross RA, editors. Green Polymer Chemistry: Biocatalysis and Biomaterials. Washington: American Chemical Society; 2010. pp. 161-73. [DOI: 10.1021/bk-2010-1043.ch012]

Substrate-inducible and antibiotic-free high-level 4-hydroxyvaleric acid production in engineered Escherichia coli

In this study, we developed a levulinic acid (LA)-inducible and antibiotic-free plasmid system mediated by HpdR/PhpdH and infA-complementation to produce 4-hydroxyvaleric acid (4-HV) from LA in an engineered Escherichia coli strain. The system was efficiently induced by the addition of the LA substrate and resulted in tight dose-dependent control and fine-tuning of gene expression. By engineering the 5′ untranslated region (UTR) of hpdR mRNA, the gene expression of green fluorescent protein (GFP) increased by at least two-fold under the hpdH promoter. Furthermore, by evaluating the robustness and plasmid stability of the proposed system, the engineered strain, IRV750f, expressing the engineered 3-hydroxybutyrate dehydrogenase (3HBDH∗) and formate dehydrogenase (CbFDH), produced 82 g/L of 4-HV from LA, with a productivity of 3.4 g/L/h and molar conversion of 92% in the fed-batch cultivation (5 L fermenter) without the addition of antibiotics or external inducers. Overall, the reported system was highly beneficial for the large-scale and cost-effective microbial production of value-added products and bulk chemicals from the renewable substrate, LA.

Engineering the lva operon and Optimization of Culture Conditions for Enhanced Production of 4-Hydroxyvalerate from Levulinic Acid in Pseudomonas putida KT2440

Monomeric 4-hydroxyvalerate is a versatile chemical used to produce various commodities and fine chemicals. In the present study, the lvaAB gene was deleted from the lva operon in Pseudomonas putida KT2440 and tesB, obtained from Escherichia coli, was overexpressed under the control of the lva operon system, which is induced by the substrate levulinic acid and the product 4-hydroxyvalerate to produce 4-hydroxyvalerate from levulinic acid. The lvaAB-deleted strain showed almost complete conversion of levulinic acid to 4-hydroxyvalerate, compared with 24% conversion in the wild-type strain. In addition, under optimized culture conditions, the final engineered strain produced a maximum of 50 g/L 4-hydroxyvalerate with 97% conversion from levulinic acid. The system presented here could be applied to produce high titers of 4-hydroxyvalerate in a cost-effective manner at a large scale from renewable cellulosic biomass.

Microbial synthesis of polyhydroxybutyrate from glycerol: gluconeogenesis, molecular weight and material properties of biopolyester

Glycerol is considered as an ideal feedstock for producing bioplastics via bacterial fermentation due to its ubiquity, low price, and high degree of reduction substrate. In this work, we study the yield and cause of limitation in poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) production from glycerol. Compared to glucose-based PHB production, PHB produced by Cupriavidus necator grown on glycerol has a low productivity (0.92 g PHB/L/h) with a comparably low maximum specific growth rate of 0.11 h(-1) . We found that C. necator can synthesize glucose from glycerol and that the lithotrophical utilization of glycerol (non-fermentative substrate) or gluconeogenesis is an essential metabolic pathway for biosynthesis of cellular components. Here, we show that gluconeogenesis affects the reduction of cell mass, the productivity of biopolymer product, and the molecular chain size of intracellular PHB synthesized from glycerol by C. necator. We use NMR spectroscopy to show that the isolated PHB is capped by glycerol. We then characterized the physical properties of the isolated glycerol-based PHB with differential scanning calorimetry and tensile tests. We found that although the final molecular weight of the glycerol-based PHB is lower than those of glucose-based and commercial PHB, the thermal and mechanical properties of the biopolymers are similar.