Engineering glucose metabolism of under nitrogen starvation.

A major aspect of microbial metabolic engineering is the development of chassis hosts that have favorable global metabolic phenotypes, and can be further engineered to produce a variety of compounds. In this work, we focus on the problem of decoupling growth and production in the model bacterium , and in particular on the maintenance of active metabolism during nitrogen-limited stationary phase. We find that by overexpressing the enzyme PtsI, a component of the glucose uptake system that is inhibited by α-ketoglutarate during nitrogen limitation, we are able to achieve a fourfold increase in metabolic rates.