Production of acetoin and its derivative tetramethylpyrazine from okara hydrolysate with Bacillus subtilis

Okara, a renewable biomass resource, is a promising fermentative raw material for the bio-production of value-added chemicals due to its abundance and low-costs. we developed a process for the enzymatic hydrolysis of okara, and then engineered Bacillus subtilis to utilize mixed sugars to produce acetoin in okara hydrolysis without the addition of a supplemental nitrogen source. Okara was initially hydrolyzed with cellulase, β-glucosidase, and pectinase to obtain okara hydrolysate containing mixed sugars (32.78 ± 0.23 g/L glucose, 1.43 ± 0.064 g/L arabinose, 7.74 ± 0.11 g/L galactose) and amino acids. In this study, Bacillus subtilis 168 was used as the acetoin-producing strain, and the key genes bdhA and acoA of the acetoin catabolism pathway were knocked out to improve the fermentation yield of acetoin. In order to utilize the galactose in the hydrolysate, the recombinant strain BS03 (Bacillus subtilis168∆bdhA∆acoA) was used to overexpress the arabinose transporter-encoding gene (araE) drive heterologous expression of the Leloir pathway gene (galKTE). The corn dry powder concentration was optimized to 29 g/L in the reducing sugar okara hydrolysate. The results show that the recombinant bacterium BS03 could still synthesize 11.79 g/L acetoin without using corn dry powder as a nitrogen source. Finally, using okara enzymatic hydrolysate as the carbon and nitrogen source, 11.11 g/L and 29.7 g/L acetoin were obtained by batch fermentation and fed-batch fermentation, respectively, which was further converted to 5.33 g/L and 13.37 g/L tetramethylpyrazine (TTMP) by reaction with an ammonium salt. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13568-023-01532-z.