Designer Outer Membrane Protein Facilitates Uptake of Decoy Molecules into a Cytochrome P450BM3-Based Whole-Cell Biocatalyst.

We report an OmpF loop deletion mutant, which improves the cellular uptake of external additives into an Escherichia coli whole-cell biocatalyst. Through co-expression of the OmpF mutant with wild-type P450BM3 in the presence of decoy molecules, the yield of the whole-cell biotransformation of benzene could be considerably improved. Notably, with the decoy molecule C7AM-Pip-Phe the yield duodecupled from 5.