Consolidated bioprocessing for bioethanol production by metabolically engineered Bacillus subtilis strains

Bioethanol produced by fermentative microorganisms is regarded as an alternative to fossil fuel. Bioethanol to be used as a viable energy source must be produced cost-effectively by removing expense-intensive steps such as the enzymatic hydrolysis of substrate. Consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) is believed to be a practical solution combining saccharification and fermentation in a single step catalyzed by a microorganism. Bacillus subtills with innate ability to grow on a diversity of carbohydrates seems promising for affordable CBP bioethanol production using renewable plant biomass and wastes. In this study, the genes encoding alcohol dehydrogenase from Z. mobilis (adh(Z)) and S. cerevisiae (adh(S)) were each used with Z. mobilis pyruvate decarboxylase gene (pdc(Z)) to create ethanologenic operons in a lactate-deficient (Δldh) B. subtilis resulting in NZ and NZS strains, respectively. The S. cerevisiae adh(S) caused significantly more ethanol production by NZS and therefore was used to make two other operons including one with double copies of both pdc(Z) and adh(S) and the other with a single pdc(Z) but double adh(S) genes expressed in N(ZS)2 and NZS2 strains, respectively. In addition, two fusion genes were constructed with pdc(Z) and adh(S) in alternate orientations and used for ethanol production by the harboring strains namely NZ:S and NS:Z, respectively. While the increase of gene dosage was not associated with elevated carbon flow for ethanol production, the fusion gene adh(S):pdc(Z) resulted in a more than two times increase of productivity by strain NS:Z as compared with NZS during 48 h fermentation. The CBP ethanol production by NZS and NS:Z using potatoes resulted in 16.3 g/L and 21.5 g/L ethanol during 96 h fermentation, respectively. For the first time in this study, B. subtilis was successfully used for CBP ethanol production with S. cerevisiae alcohol dehydrogenase. The results of the study provide insights on the potentials of B. subtilis for affordable bioethanol production from inexpensive plant biomass and wastes. However, the potentials need to be improved by metabolic and process engineering for higher yields of ethanol production and plant biomass utilization.