Exploiting the Feedstock Flexibility of the Emergent Synthetic Biology Chassis Vibrio natriegens for Engineered Natural Product Production

A recent goal of synthetic biology has been to identify new chassis that provide benefits lacking in model organisms. Vibrio natriegens is a marine Gram-negative bacterium which is an emergent synthetic biology chassis with inherent benefits: An extremely fast growth rate, genetic tractability, and the ability to grow on a variety of carbon sources (“feedstock flexibility”). Given these inherent benefits, we sought to determine its potential to heterologously produce natural products, and chose beta-carotene and violacein as test cases. For beta-carotene production, we expressed the beta-carotene biosynthetic pathway from the sister marine bacterium Vibrio campbellii, as well as the mevalonate biosynthetic pathway from the Gram-positive bacterium Lactobacillus acidophilus to improve precursor abundance. Violacein was produced by expressing a biosynthetic gene cluster derived from Chromobacterium violaceum. Not only was V. natriegens able to heterologously produce these compounds in rich media, illustrating its promise as a new chassis for small molecule drug production, but it also did so in minimal media using a variety of feedstocks. The ability for V. natriegens to produce natural products with multiple industrially-relevant feedstocks argues for continued investigations into the production of more complex natural products in this chassis.