Reverse engineering of fatty acid-tolerant Escherichia coli identifies design strategies for robust microbial cell factories.

ABSTRACT: Adaptive laboratory evolution is often used to improve the performance of microbial cell factories. Reverse engineering of evolved strains enables learning and subsequent incorporation of novel design strategies via the design-build-test-learn cycle. Here, we reverse engineer a strain of Escherichia coli previously evolved for increased tolerance of octanoic acid (C8), an attractive biorenewable chemical, resulting in increased C8 production, increased butanol tolerance, and altered membrane properties. Here, evolution was determined to have occurred first through the restoration of WaaG activity, involved in the production of lipopolysaccharides, then an amino acid change in RpoC, a subunit of RNA polymerase, and finally mutation of the BasS-BasR two component system. All three mutations

SUBMITTER: Chen Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7501233 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature