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Awakening sleeping beauty: production of propionic acid in Escherichia coli through the sbm operon requires the activity of a methylmalonyl-CoA epimerase

Overview of attention for article published in Microbial Cell Factories, July 2017
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Title
Awakening sleeping beauty: production of propionic acid in Escherichia coli through the sbm operon requires the activity of a methylmalonyl-CoA epimerase
Published in
Microbial Cell Factories, July 2017
DOI 10.1186/s12934-017-0735-4
Pubmed ID
Authors

Ricardo Axayacatl Gonzalez-Garcia, Tim McCubbin, Annalena Wille, Manuel Plan, Lars Keld Nielsen, Esteban Marcellin

Abstract

Propionic acid is used primarily as a food preservative with smaller applications as a chemical building block for the production of many products including fabrics, cosmetics, drugs, and plastics. Biological production using propionibacteria would be competitive against chemical production through hydrocarboxylation of ethylene if native producers could be engineered to reach near-theoretical yield and good productivity. Unfortunately, engineering propionibacteria has proven very challenging. It has been suggested that activation of the sleeping beauty operon in Escherichia coli is sufficient to achieve propionic acid production. Optimising E. coli production should be much easier than engineering propionibacteria if tolerance issues can be addressed. Propionic acid is produced in E. coli via the sleeping beauty mutase operon under anaerobic conditions in rich medium via amino acid degradation. We observed that the sbm operon enhances amino acids degradation to propionic acid and allows E. coli to degrade isoleucine. However, we show here that the operon lacks an epimerase reaction that enables propionic acid production in minimal medium containing glucose as the sole carbon source. Production from glucose can be restored by engineering the system with a methylmalonyl-CoA epimerase from Propionibacterium acidipropionici (0.23 ± 0.02 mM). 1-Propanol production was also detected from the promiscuous activity of the native alcohol dehydrogenase (AdhE). We also show that aerobic conditions are favourable for propionic acid production. Finally, we increase titre 65 times using a combination of promoter engineering and process optimisation. The native sbm operon encodes an incomplete pathway. Production of propionic acid from glucose as sole carbon source is possible when the pathway is complemented with a methylmalonyl-CoA epimerase. Although propionic acid via the restored succinate dissimilation pathway is considered a fermentative process, the engineered pathway was shown to be functional under anaerobic and aerobic conditions.

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The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 51 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 51 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Ph. D. Student 12 24%
Researcher 7 14%
Student > Bachelor 6 12%
Student > Master 5 10%
Professor 3 6%
Other 5 10%
Unknown 13 25%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology 15 29%
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 7 14%
Engineering 3 6%
Chemical Engineering 2 4%
Chemistry 2 4%
Other 4 8%
Unknown 18 35%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 18 July 2017.
All research outputs
#19,087,434
of 23,652,325 outputs
Outputs from Microbial Cell Factories
#1,260
of 1,672 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#219,128
of 284,258 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Microbial Cell Factories
#24
of 30 outputs
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So far Altmetric has tracked 1,672 research outputs from this source. They receive a mean Attention Score of 4.6. This one is in the 15th percentile – i.e., 15% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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