Directed evolution of alditol oxidase for the production of optically pure D-glycerate from glycerol in the engineered Escherichia coli

D-glycerate is an attractive chemical for a wide variety of pharmaceutical, cosmetic, biodegradable polymers, and other applications. Now several studies have been reported about the synthesis of glycerate by different biotechnological and chemical routes from glycerol or other feedstock. Here, we present the construction of an Escherichia coli engineered strain to produce optically pure D-glycerate by oxidizing glycerol with an evolved variant of alditol oxidase (AldO) from Streptomyces coelicolor. This is achieved by starting from a previously reported variant mAldO and employing three rounds of directed evolution, as well as the combination of growth-coupled high throughput selection with colorimetric screening. The variant eAldO3-24 displays a higher substrate affinity toward glycerol with 5.23-fold than the wild-type AldO, and a 1.85-fold increase of catalytic efficiency (k(cat)/K(M)). Then we introduced an isopropyl-β-D-thiogalactopyranoside (IPTG)-inducible T7 expression system in E. coli to overexpress the variant eAldO3-24, and deleted glucosylglycerate phosphorylase encoding gene ycjM to block the consumption of D-glycerate. Finally, the resulting strain TZ-170 produced 30.1 g/l D-glycerate at 70 h with a yield of 0.376 mol/mol in 5-l fed-batch fermentation.