Functional evaluation of non-oxidative glycolysis in Escherichia coli in the stationary phase under microaerobic conditions.

In microbial bioproduction, CO emissions via pyruvate dehydrogenase in the Embden-Meyerhof pathway, which converts glucose to acetyl-CoA, is one of the challenges for enhancing carbon yield. The synthetic non-oxidative glycolysis (NOG) pathway transforms glucose into three acetyl-CoA molecules without CO emission, making it an attractive module for metabolic engineering. Because the NOG pathway generates no ATP and NADH, it is expected to use a resting cell reaction.

Metabolic pathway design for growth-associated phenylalanine production using synthetically designed mutualism.

Combination of growth-associated pathway engineering based on flux balance analysis (FBA) and adaptive laboratory evolution (ALE) is a powerful approach to enhance the production of useful compounds. However, the feasibility of such growth-associated pathway designs depends on the type of target compound. In the present study, FBA predicted a set of gene deletions (pykA, pykF, ppc, zwf, and adhE) that leads to growth-associated phenylalanine production in Escherichia coli.

Acceleration of target production in co-culture by enhancing intermediate consumption through adaptive laboratory evolution.

Co-culture is a promising way to alleviate metabolic burden by dividing the metabolic pathways into several modules and sharing the conversion processes with multiple strains. Since an intermediate is passed from the donor to the recipient via the extracellular environment, it is inevitably diluted. Therefore, enhancing the intermediate consumption rate is important for increasing target productivity.