Biofuel offers a promising solution to the adverse environmental problems and depletion in reserves of fossil fuels. Higher alcohols including 3-methyl-1-butanol were paid much more attention as fuel substitute in recent years, due to its similar properties to gasoline. In the present work, 3-methyl-1-butanol production in engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum was studied. α-Ketoisovalerate decarboxylase gene (kivd) from Lactococcus lactis combined with alcohol dehydrogenase gene (adh2, adhA, and adh3) from three organisms were overexpressed in C. glutamicum. Enzymatic assay and alcohol production results showed that adh3 from Zymomonas mobilis was the optimum candidate for 3-methyl-1-butanol production in C. glutamicum. The recombinant with kivd and adh3 could produce 0.182 g/L of 3-methyl-1-butanol and 0.144 g/L of isobutanol after 12 h of incubation. Further inactivation of the E1 subunit of pyruvate dehydrogenase complex gene (aceE) and lactic dehydrogenase gene (ldh) in the above C. glutamicum strain would improve the 3-Methyl-1-butanol titer to 0.497 g/L after 12 h of incubation.
Keywords: 3-Methyl-1-butanol; Alcohol dehydrogenase; Corynebacterium glutamicum; Gene knockout; α-Ketoisovalerate decarboxylase.