Enhancing Production of Bio-Isoprene Using Hybrid MVA Pathway and Isoprene Synthase in E. coli

The depleting petroleum reserve, increasingly severe energy crisis, and global climate change are reigniting enthusiasm for seeking sustainable technologies to replace petroleum as a source of fuel and chemicals. In this paper, the efficiency of the MVA pathway on isoprene production has been improved as follows: firstly, in order to increase MVA production, the source of the “upper pathway” which contains HMG-CoA synthase, acetyl-CoA acetyltransferase and HMG-CoA reductase to covert acetyl-CoA into MVA has been changed from Saccharomyces cerevisiae to Enterococcus faecalis; secondly, to further enhance the production of MVA and isoprene, a alanine 110 of the mvaS gene has been mutated to a glycine. The final genetic strain YJM25 containing the optimized MVA pathway and isoprene synthase from Populus alba can accumulate isoprene up to 6.3 g/L after 40 h of fed-batch cultivation.