Chapter 14 - System Metabolic Engineering Applications in Corynebacterium crenatum for l-Arginine Production

Abstract

l-Arginine is an important amino acid in food and pharmaceutical industries. The industrial level of l-arginine production by microbial fermentation has become an important task to substitute for the method of polluting keratin acid hydrolysis. This chapter briefly introduces l-arginine production by Corynebacterium crenatum SYPA 5-5 and its recombinants developed using genetic engineering, metabolic engineering, and synthetic biology techniques. Systems and synthetic metabolic engineering has been performed in C. crenatum for improved l-arginine production, involving amplification of l-arginine biosynthetic pathway flux; optimization of NADPH supply; increasing glucose consumption; channeling excess carbon flux to alleviate the glucose overflow metabolism; redistribution of carbon flux to channel more flux into l-arginine biosynthetic pathway and minimization of carbon and cofactor loss. Overall, this yielded the rationally designed l-arginine producers that are superior to the classical production strains and clearly highlights the value of system and synthetic metabolic engineering.