Engineering a Highly Efficient Carboligase for Synthetic One-Carbon Metabolism

[Image: see text] One of the biggest challenges to realize a circular carbon economy is the synthesis of complex carbon compounds from one-carbon (C1) building blocks. Since the natural solution space of C1–C1 condensations is limited to highly complex enzymes, the development of more simple and robust biocatalysts may facilitate the engineering of C1 assimilation routes. Thiamine diphosphate-dependent enzymes harbor great potential for this task, due to their ability to create C–C bonds. Here, we employed structure-guided iterative saturation mutagenesis to convert oxalyl-CoA decarboxylase (OXC) from Methylobacterium extorquens into a glycolyl-CoA synthase (GCS) that allows for the direct condensation of the two C1 units formyl-CoA and formaldehyde. A quadruple variant MeOXC4 showed a 100 000-fold switch between OXC and GCS activities, a 200-fold increase in the GCS activity compared to the wild type, and formaldehyde affinity that is comparable to natural formaldehyde-converting enzymes. Notably, MeOCX4 outcompetes all other natural and engineered enzymes for C1–C1 condensations by more than 40-fold in catalytic efficiency and is highly soluble in Escherichia coli. In addition to the increased GCS activity, MeOXC4 showed up to 300-fold higher activity than the wild type toward a broad range of carbonyl acceptor substrates. When applied in vivo, MeOXC4 enables the production of glycolate from formaldehyde, overcoming the current bottleneck of C1–C1 condensation in whole-cell bioconversions and paving the way toward synthetic C1 assimilation routes in vivo.