Background: Glycosaminoglycans, such as hyaluronic acid, heparin, and chondroitin sulfate, are among the top ranked products in industrial biotechnology for biomedical applications, with a growing world market of billion dollars per year. Recently a remarkable progress has been made in the development of tailor-made strains as sources for the manufacturing of such products. The genetic modification of E. coli K4, a natural producer of chondroitin sulfate precursor, is challenging considering the lack of detailed information on its genome, as well as its mobilome. Chondroitin sulfate is currently used as nutraceutical for the treatment of osteoarthritis, and several new therapeutic applications, spanning from the development of skin substitutes to live attenuated vaccines, are under evaluation.
Results: E. coli K4 was used as host for the overexpression of RfaH, a positive regulator that controls expression of the polysaccharide biosynthesis genes and other genes necessary for the virulence of E. coli K4. Various engineering strategies were compared to investigate different types of expression systems (plasmid vs integrative cassettes) and integration sites (genome vs endogenous mobile element). All strains analysed in shake flasks on different media showed a capsular polysaccharide production improved by 40 to 140%, compared to the wild type, with respect to the final product titer. A DO-stat fed-batch process on the 2L scale was also developed for the best performing integrative strain, EcK4r3, yielding 5.3 g ∙ L(-1) of K4 polysaccharide. The effect of rfaH overexpression in EcK4r3 affected the production of lipopolysaccharide and the expression of genes involved in the polysaccharide biosynthesis pathway (kfoC and kfoA), as expected. An alteration of cellular metabolism was revealed by changes of intracellular pools of UDP-sugars which are used as precursors for polysaccharide biosynthesis.
Conclusions: The present study describes the identification of a gene target and the application of a successful metabolic engineering strategy to the unconventional host E. coli K4 demonstrating the feasibility of using the recombinant strain as stable cell factory for further process implementations.