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Redirecting reductant flux into hydrogen production via metabolic engineering of fermentative carbon metabolism in a cyanobacterium.

ABSTRACT: Some aquatic microbial oxygenic photoautotrophs (AMOPs) make hydrogen (H(2)), a carbon-neutral, renewable product derived from water, in low yields during autofermentation (anaerobic metabolism) of intracellular carbohydrates previously stored during aerobic photosynthesis. We have constructed a mutant (the ldhA mutant) of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. strain PCC 7002 lacking the enzyme for the NADH-dependent reduction of pyruvate to D-lactate, the major fermentative reductant sink in this AMOP. Both nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) metabolomic methods have shown that autofermentation by the ldhA mutant resulted in no D-lactate production and higher concentrations of excreted acetate, alanine, succinate, and hydrogen (up to 5-fold) compared to that by the wild type. The measured intracellular NAD(P)(H) concentrations demonstrated that the NAD(P)H/NAD(P)(+) ratio increased appreciably during autofermentation in the ldhA strain; we propose this to be the principal source of the observed increase in H(2) production via an NADH-dependent, bidirectional [NiFe] hydrogenase. Despite the elevated NAD(P)H/NAD(P)(+) ratio, no decrease was found in the rate of anaerobic conversion of stored carbohydrates. The measured energy conversion efficiency (ECE) from biomass (as glucose equivalents) converted to hydrogen in the ldhA mutant is 12%. Together with the unimpaired photoautotrophic growth of the ldhA mutant, these attributes reveal that metabolic engineering is an effective strategy to enhance H(2) production in AMOPs without compromising viability.

SUBMITTER: McNeely K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2916493 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Redirecting reductant flux into hydrogen production via metabolic engineering of fermentative carbon metabolism in a cyanobacterium.

McNeely Kelsey K Xu Yu Y Bennette Nick N Bryant Donald A DA Dismukes G Charles GC

Applied and environmental microbiology 20100611 15

Some aquatic microbial oxygenic photoautotrophs (AMOPs) make hydrogen (H(2)), a carbon-neutral, renewable product derived from water, in low yields during autofermentation (anaerobic metabolism) of intracellular carbohydrates previously stored during aerobic photosynthesis. We have constructed a mutant (the ldhA mutant) of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. strain PCC 7002 lacking the enzyme for the NADH-dependent reduction of pyruvate to D-lactate, the major fermentative reductant sink in thi ...[more]

PMID: 20543051

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Project description:Photosynthetic microbes can produce the clean-burning fuel hydrogen using one of natureâ??s most plentiful resources, sunlight 1,2. Anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria generate hydrogen and ammonia during a process known as biological nitrogen fixation. This reaction is catalyzed by the enzyme nitrogenase and consumes nitrogen gas, ATP and electrons 3. One bacterium, Rhodopseudomonas palustris, has a remarkable ability to obtain electrons from green plant-derived material 4,5 and to efficiently absorb both high and low intensity light energy to form ATP 6. Manipulating R. palustris or a similar organism to produce hydrogen commercially will require us to identify all its genes that contribute to hydrogen production and to understand how this process is regulated in cells. Here we describe mutant strains in which metabolism is redirected such that hydrogen production is uncoupled from nitrogen fixation. Our data indicate that three different single amino acid changes in the transcriptional regulator NifA each yielded strains that produced hydrogen even in the presence of the repressing nitrogen source ammonium and in the absence of specific inducing metabolic signals. We used the mutants to show that, in addition to nitrogenase genes, 18 genes outside of the nitrogenase gene cluster may contribute to hydrogen production. Some of these genes are likely involved in efficient ATP acquisition and in channeling electrons to nitrogenase for reduction of protons to molecular hydrogen. Our results demonstrate that photosynthetic bacteria can be genetically manipulated for sustained production of pure hydrogen in a variety of cultivation conditions in the absence of oxygen, nitrogen or other gases as long as light and an electron donor are supplied. Transcriptome profile of wild type (CGA009) growing photosynthetically in the presence of amonium an acetate was compare with that of 4 different mutants (CGA570, CGA571, CGA572 and CGA574). We did 2 biological replicates per strain.

Dataset Information

Redirecting reductant flux into hydrogen production via metabolic engineering of fermentative carbon metabolism in a cyanobacterium.

Publications

Redirecting reductant flux into hydrogen production via metabolic engineering of fermentative carbon metabolism in a cyanobacterium.

Similar Datasets

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