(13)C metabolic flux analysis-guided metabolic engineering of Escherichia coli for improved acetol production from glycerol

BACKGROUND: Bioprocessing offers a sustainable and green approach to manufacture various chemicals and materials. Development of bioprocesses requires transforming common producer strains to cell factories. (13)C metabolic flux analysis ((13)C-MFA) can be applied to identify relevant targets to accomplish the desired phenotype, which has become one of the major tools to support systems metabolic engineering. In this research, we applied (13)C-MFA to identify bottlenecks in the bioconversion of glycerol into acetol by Escherichia coli. Valorization of glycerol, the main by-product of biodiesel, has contributed to the viability of biofuel economy. RESULTS: We performed (13)C-MFA and measured intracellular pyridine nucleotide pools in a first-generation acetol producer strain (HJ06) and a non-producer strain (HJ06C), and identified that engineering the NADPH regeneration is a promising target. Based on this finding, we overexpressed nadK encoding NAD kinase or pntAB encoding membrane-bound transhydrogenase either individually or in combination with HJ06, obtaining HJ06N, HJ06P and HJ06PN. The step-wise approach resulted in increasing the acetol titer from 0.91 g/L (HJ06) to 2.81 g/L (HJ06PN). To systematically characterize and the effect of mutation(s) on the metabolism, we also examined the metabolomics and transcriptional levels of key genes in four strains. The pool sizes of NADPH, NADP(+) and the NADPH/NADP(+) ratio were progressively increased from HJ06 to HJ06PN, demonstrating that the sufficient NADPH supply is critical for acetol production. Flux distribution was optimized towards acetol formation from HJ06 to HJ06PN: (1) The carbon partitioning at the DHAP node directed gradually more carbon from the lower glycolytic pathway through the acetol biosynthetic pathway; (2) The transhydrogenation flux was constantly increased. In addition, (13)C-MFA showed the rigidity of upper glycolytic pathway, PP pathway and the TCA cycle to support growth. The flux patterns were supported by most metabolomics data and gene expression profiles. CONCLUSIONS: This research demonstrated how (13)C-MFA can be applied to drive the cycles of design, build, test and learn implementation for strain development. This succeeding engineering strategy can also be applicable for rational design of other microbial cell factories. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13068-019-1372-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.