Metabolic Engineering of Bacillus licheniformis for Production of Acetoin

Chuanjuan Lü; Yongsheng Ge; Menghao Cao; Xiaoting Guo; Peihai Liu; Chao Gao; Ping Xu; Cuiqing Ma

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2020.00125

Metabolic Engineering of Bacillus licheniformis for Production of Acetoin

Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2020 Feb 21:8:125. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2020.00125. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Chuanjuan Lü¹, Yongsheng Ge¹, Menghao Cao¹, Xiaoting Guo¹, Peihai Liu¹, Chao Gao¹, Ping Xu², Cuiqing Ma¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology, Shandong University, Jinan, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Microbial Metabolism, Joint International Research Laboratory of Metabolic and Developmental Sciences, School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.

Abstract

Acetoin is a potential platform compound for a variety of chemicals. Bacillus licheniformis MW3, a thermophilic and generally regarded as safe (GRAS) microorganism, can produce 2,3-butanediol with a high concentration, yield, and productivity. In this study, B. licheniformis MW3 was metabolic engineered for acetoin production. After deleting two 2,3-butanediol dehydrogenases encoding genes budC and gdh, an engineered strain B. licheniformis MW3 (ΔbudCΔgdh) was constructed. Using fed-batch fermentation of B. licheniformis MW3 (ΔbudCΔgdh), 64.2 g/L acetoin was produced at a productivity of 2.378 g/[L h] and a yield of 0.412 g/g from 156 g/L glucose in 27 h. The fermentation process exhibited rather high productivity and yield of acetoin, indicating that B. licheniformis MW3 (ΔbudCΔgdh) might be a promising acetoin producer.

Keywords: 2; 3-butanediol; 3-butanediol dehydrogenase; Bacillus licheniformis; acetoin; metabolic engineering.