Optimization of ʟ-ornithine production in recombinant Corynebacterium glutamicum S9114 by cg3035 overexpression and manipulating the central metabolic pathway

BACKGROUND: ʟ-Ornithine is an important amino acid with broad applications in pharmaceutical and food industries. Despite lagging ʟ-ornithine productivity and cost reduction, microbial fermentation is a promising route for sustainable ʟ-ornithine production and thus development of robust microbial strains with high stability and productivity is essential. RESULTS: Previously, we systematically developed a new strain, SO1 originate from Corynebacterium glutamicum S9114, for ʟ-ornithine production. In this work, overexpression of cg3035 encoding N-acetylglutamate synthase (NAGS) using a plasmid or by inserting a strong P(tac) promoter into the chromosome was found to increase ʟ-ornithine production in the engineered C. glutamicum SO1. The genome-based cg3035 modulated strain was further engineered by attenuating the expression of pta and cat, inserting a strong P(eftu) promoter in the upstream region of glycolytic enzymes such as pfkA, gap, and pyk, and redirecting carbon flux to the pentose phosphate pathway. The final strain with all the exploratory metabolic engineering manipulations produced 32.3 g/L of ʟ-ornithine, a yield of 0.395 g ornithine per g glucose, which was 35.7% higher than that produced by the original strain (23.8 g/L). CONCLUSION: These results clearly demonstrated that enhancing the expression of NAGS promoted ʟ-ornithine production and provide a promising alternative systematic blueprint for developing ʟ-ornithine-producing C. glutamicum strains. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12934-018-0940-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.