Abstract

Guanosine 5'-diphosphate (GDP)-l-fucose is an important nucleotide sugar involved in the synthesis of fucosylated oligosaccharides, such as fucosylated human milk oligosaccharides, which play important roles in physiological and pathological processes. Here, a combinatorial modular pathway engineering strategy was implemented to efficiently increase the intracellular titers of GDP-l-fucose in engineered Escherichia coli. The de novo GDP-l-fucose synthesis pathway was partitioned into two modules and fine-tuned at both transcriptional and translational levels, which remarkably improved the GDP-l-fucose production. In addition, the gene encoding the UDP-glucose lipid carrier transferase (WcaJ) was inactivated to eliminate the competing metabolite pathway from GDP-l-fucose to colanic acid. Furthermore, cofactors were regenerated to promote biocatalysis. Taken together, the final engineered strain EWL37, which could achieve a titer of 18.33 mg/L in shake-flask cultivation, showed 106.21 mg/L intracellular GDP-l-fucose accumulation and a DCW-specific GDP-l-fucose content of 4.28 mg/g through fed-batch cultivation. In general, this study demonstrated that the utilization of combinatorial modular pathway engineering significantly improved the de novo synthesis of GDP-l-fucose in engineered E. coli.

Highlights

  • Guanosine 5′-diphosphate (GDP)-L-fucose is a vital nucleotide sugar involved in the synthesis of fucosylated oligosaccharides, such as fucosylated human milk oligosaccharides, which play important roles in physiological and pathological processes

  • To date, this is the first utilization of a modular pathway optimization approach to increase the production potential of the de novo synthesized GDP-L-fucose

  • Given that GDP-D-mannose is a pivotal precursor in the target pathway, ManB and ManC were placed as the upstream module responsible for converting mannose-1-P into GDP-D-mannose

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Summary

Introduction

Guanosine 5′-diphosphate (GDP)-L-fucose is a vital nucleotide sugar involved in the synthesis of fucosylated oligosaccharides, such as fucosylated human milk oligosaccharides, which play important roles in physiological and pathological processes. GDP-L-fucose is primarily harnessed as an important glycosyl donor for protein glycosylation and as a precursor for the synthesis of other sugar nucleotides in eukaryotes. It is mainly involved in the biotransformation of fucosylated oligosaccharides in prokaryotes [2]. Large-scale production of fucosylated HMOs can be an arduous task due to the limitation in the availability of GDP- L-fucose. As an indispensable precursor in the biosynthesis of fucosylated HMOs, efficient production of GDP- L-fucose is very important

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