Development of a novel strategy for robust synthetic bacterial promoters based on a stepwise evolution targeting the spacer region of the core promoter in Bacillus subtilis

BACKGROUND: Promoter evolution by synthetic promoter library (SPL) is a powerful approach to development of functional synthetic promoters to synthetic biology. However, it requires much tedious and time-consuming screenings because of the plethora of different variants in SPL. Actually, a large proportion of mutants in the SPL are significantly lower in strength, which contributes only to fabrication of a promoter library with a continuum of strength. Thus, to effectively obtain the evolved synthetic promoter exhibiting higher strength, it is essential to develop novel strategies to construct mutant library targeting the pivotal region rather than the arbitrary region of the template promoter. In this study, a strategy termed stepwise evolution targeting the spacer of core promoter (SETarSCoP) was established in Bacillus subtilis to effectively evolve the strength of bacterial promoter. RESULTS: The native promoter, P(srfA), from B. subtilis, which exhibits higher strength than the strong promoter P43, was set as the parental template. According to the comparison of conservation of the spacer sequences between − 35 box and − 10 box among a set of strong and weak native promoter, it revealed that 7-bp sequence immediately upstream of the − 10 box featured in the regulation of promoter strength. Based on the conservative feature, two rounds of consecutive evolution were performed targeting the hot region of P(srfA). In the first round, a primary promoter mutation library (pPML) was constructed by mutagenesis targeting the 3-bp sequence immediately upstream of the − 10 box of the P(srfA). Subsequently, four evolved mutants from pPML were selected to construction of four secondary promoter mutation libraries (sPMLs) based on mutagenesis of the 4-bp sequence upstream of the first-round target. After the consecutive two-step evolution, the mutant P(BH4) was identified and verified to be a highly evolved synthetic promoter. The strength of P(BH4) was higher than P(srfA) by approximately 3 times. Moreover, P(BH4) also exhibited broad suitability for different cargo proteins, such as β-glucuronidase and nattokinase. The proof-of-principle test showed that SETarSCoP successfully evolved both constitutive and inducible promoters. CONCLUSION: Comparing with the commonly used SPL strategy, SETarSCoP facilitates the evolution process to obtain strength-evolved synthetic bacterial promoter through fabrication and screening of small-scale mutation libraries. This strategy will be a promising method to evolve diverse bacterial promoters to expand the toolbox for synthetic biology. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12934-019-1148-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.