Microbial 2-butanol production with .

Background: Biobutanol has great potential as biofuel of the future. However, only a few organisms have the natural ability to produce butanol. Amongst them, spp. are the most efficient producers. The high toxicity of biobutanol constitutes one of the bottlenecks within the biobutanol production process which often suffers from low final butanol concentrations and yields. Butanol tolerance is a key driver for process optimisation and, therefore, in the search for alternative butanol production hosts. Many species show a remarkable tolerance to solvents and some spp. are known to naturally produce 2-butanol from meso-2,3-butanediol (meso-2,3-BTD) during anaerobic sugar fermentations. showed already to be highly efficient in the production of other bulk chemicals using a simple two-step metabolic pathway. Exactly, the same pathway enables this cell factory for 2-butanol production.

Results: Due to the inability of to produce meso-2,3-BTD, a two-step cultivation processes with has been developed. is a very efficient producer of meso-2,3-BTD from glucose. The process yielded a butanol concentration of 10 g/L relying on wild-type bacterial strains. A further improvement of the maximum butanol titer was achieved using an engineered strain overexpressing the endogenous alcohol dehydrogenase pduQ. The two-step cultivation process based on the engineered strain led to a maximum 2-butanol titer of 13.4 g/L, which is an increase of 34%.

Conclusion: In this study, is for the first time described as a good natural producer for 2-butanol from meso-2,3-butanediol. Through the application of a two-step cultivation process with 2-butanol can be produced from glucose in a one-vessel, two-step microbial process.