2024.06.11
Development of metabolically engineered microorganisms overproducing pharmaceutical and cosmetic raw materials
Molecular microbiology ・ Visiting Associate Professor ・ Takahisa Kogure
Fermentation technology, which utilizes diverse metabolic abilities of microorganisms, is not only used in the production of traditional fermented foods, but has also been expanded to diverse chemical production due to recent progress of synthetic biology technologies such as design and introduction of artificial metabolic pathways as well as dramatic increase of gene resources. We are working on the development of microorganisms harboring the ability to overproduce useful compounds utilizing Corynebacterium glutamicum, which is utilized for industrial fermentative production of amino acids, as a microbial host strain. It has been proved that C. glutamicum not only has high ability of fermentative production but also has robustness as the bioproduction host organism such as high resistance to various toxic compounds. It can be possible to generate C. glutamicum strains overproducing biofuels, and raw materials of biomass plastics, drugs, cosmetics, and perfumes by introducing genetic modifications based on the metabolic design to maximize their productivities. In this issue, we introduce about the metabolic engineering of strains overproducing shikimic acid and protocatechuic acid, which are valuable chemicals as raw materials of drugs, cosmetics, and biopolymers.
Fig. 1 Production method of shikimic acid and protocatechuic acid.
Fig. 2 Biosynthetic pathways for shikimic acid and protocatechuic acid and metabolic engineering for their overproduction.
Fig. 3 Improvement of shikimic acid productivity by cumulative gene modifications.
*1 The number in the parenthesis indicates the copy number of genes which is integrated into the genome.
*2 aroK(M): The gene encoding AroK with weakened enzymatic activity.
Fig. 4 Valuable chemicals which can be obtained via bioconversion of protocatechuic acid
Takahisa Kogure NAIST Edge BIO, e0025. (2024).