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Background: Sucrose is an naturally abundant and easily fermentable feedstock for various biochemical production processes. By now, several sucrose utilization pathways have been identified and characterized. Among them, the pathway consists of sucrose permease and sucrose phosphorylase is an energy-conserving sucrose utilization pathway because it consumes less ATP when comparing to other known pathways. Bacillus amyloliquefaciens NK-1 strain can use sucrose as the feedstock to produce poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA), a highly valuable biopolymer. The native sucrose utilization pathway in NK-1 strain consists of phosphoenolpyruvate-dependent phosphotransferase system and sucrose-6-P hydrolase and consumes more ATP than the energy-conserving sucrose utilization pathway., Results: In this study, the native sucrose utilization pathway in NK-1 was firstly deleted and generated the B. amyloliquefaciens 3Δ strain. Then four combination of heterologous energy-conserving sucrose utilization pathways were constructed and introduced into the 3Δ strain. Results demonstrated that the combination of cscB (encodes sucrose permease) from Escherichia coli and sucP (encodes sucrose phosphorylase) from Bifidobacterium adolescentis showed the highest sucrose metabolic efficiency. The corresponding mutant consumed 49.4% more sucrose and produced 38.5% more γ-PGA than the NK-1 strain under the same fermentation conditions., Conclusions: To our best knowledge, this is the first report concerning the enhancement of the target product production by introducing the heterologous energy-conserving sucrose utilization pathways. Such a strategy can be easily extended to other microorganism hosts for reinforced biochemical production using sucrose as substrate.

Background: Poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) is a valuable polymer with glutamate as its sole precursor. Enhancement of the intracellular glutamate synthesis is a very important strategy for the improvement of γ-PGA production, especially for those glutamate-independent γ-PGA producing strains. Corynebacterium glutamicum has long been used for industrial glutamate production and it exhibits some unique features for glutamate synthesis; therefore introduction of these metabolic characters into the γ-PGA producing strain might lead to increased intracellular glutamate availability, and thus ultimate γ-PGA production., Results: In this study, the unique glutamate synthesis features from C. glutamicum was introduced into the glutamate-independent γ-PGA producing Bacillus amyloliquefaciens NK-1 strain. After introducing the energy-saving NADPH-dependent glutamate dehydrogenase (NADPH-GDH) pathway, the NK-1 (pHT315-gdh) strain showed slightly increase (by 9.1%) in γ-PGA production. Moreover, an optimized metabolic toggle switch for controlling the expression of ɑ-oxoglutarate dehydrogenase complex (ODHC) was introduced into the NK-1 strain, because it was previously shown that the ODHC in C. glutamicum was completely inhibited when glutamate was actively produced. The obtained NK-PO1 (pHT01-xylR) strain showed 66.2% higher γ-PGA production than the NK-1 strain. However, the further combination of these two strategies (introducing both NADPH-GDH pathway and the metabolic toggle switch) did not lead to further increase of γ-PGA production but rather the resultant γ-PGA production was even lower than that in the NK-1 strain., Conclusions: We proposed new metabolic engineering strategies to improve the γ-PGA production in B. amyloliquefaciens. The NK-1 (pHT315-gdh) strain with the introduction of NADPH-GDH pathway showed 9.1% improvement in γ-PGA production. The NK-PO1 (pHT01-xylR) strain with the introduction of a metabolic toggle switch for controlling the expression of ODHC showed 66.2% higher γ-PGA production than the NK-1 strain. This work proposed a new strategy for improving the target product in microbial cell factories.

Levan is a functional homopolymer of fructose with considerable applications in food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. To improve the levan production in Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, the regulatory elements of sacB (encoding levansucrase) expression and levansucrase secretion were optimized. Four heterologous promoters were evaluated for sacB expression, and the Pgrac promoter led to the highest level for both sacB transcription and levansucrase enzyme activity. The levan production in the corresponding recombinant strain ΔLP-pHTPgrac reached 30.5 g/L, which was 114% higher than that of the control strain NK-ΔLP. In a further step, eight signal peptides were investigated (with Pgrac as the promoter for sacB expression) for their effects on the levansucrase secretion and levan production. The signal peptide yncM was identified as the optimal one, with a secretion efficiency of approximately 90%, and the levan production in the corresponding recombinant strain ΔLP-Y reached 37.4 g/L, which was 161% higher when compared with the control strains NK-ΔLP. Finally, fed-batch fermentation was carried out in 5-L bioreactors for levan production using the recombinant strain ΔLP-Y. A final levan concentration of 102 g/L was achieved, which is very close to the ever reported highest levan production level from the literature. To our best knowledge, this is the first report of the improvement of levan production through metabolic optimization for sacB expression and levansucrase secretion. The results from this study provided essential insights for systematically metabolic engineering of microbial cell factories for enhanced biochemical production.

Poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) is an important natural biopolymer that is used widely in fields of foods, medicine, cosmetics, and agriculture. Several B. amyloliquefaciens LL3 mutants were constructed to improve γ-PGA synthesis via single or multiple marker-less in-frame deletions of four gene clusters (itu, bae, srf, and fen) encoding antibiotic substances. γ-PGA synthesis by the Δsrf mutant showed a slight increase (4.1 g/L) compared with that of the wild-type strain (3.3 g/L). The ΔituΔsrf mutant showed increased γ-PGA yield from 3.3 to 4.5 g/L, with an increase of 36.4%. The γ-PGA yield of the ΔituΔsrfΔfen and ΔituΔsrfΔfenΔbae mutants did not show a further increase. The four gene clusters' roles in swarming motility and biofilm formation were also studied. The Δsrf and Δbae mutant strains were both significantly defective in swarming, indicating that bacillaene and surfactin are involved in swarming motility of B. amyloliquefaciens LL3. Furthermore, Δsrf and Δitu mutant strains were obviously defective in biofilm formation; therefore, iturin and surfactin must play important roles in biofilm formation in B. amyloliquefaciens LL3., (© 2016 The Authors. MicrobiologyOpen published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Actin-like MreB paralogs play important roles in cell shape maintenance, cell wall synthesis and the regulation of the D,L-endopeptidases, CwlO and LytE. The gram-positive bacteria, Bacillus amyloliquefaciens LL3, is a poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) producing strain that contains three MreB paralogs: MreB, Mbl and MreBH. In B. amyloliquefaciens, CwlO and LytE can degrade γ-PGA. In this study, we aimed to test the hypothesis that modulating transcript levels of MreB paralogs would alter the synthesis and degradation of γ-PGA. The results showed that overexpression or inhibition of MreB, Mbl or MreBH had distinct effects on cell morphology and the molecular weight of the γ-PGA products. In fermentation medium, cells of mreB inhibition mutant were 50.2% longer than LL3, and the γ-PGA titer increased by 55.7%. However, changing the expression level of mbl showed only slight effects on the morphology, γ-PGA molecular weight and titer. In the mreBH inhibition mutant, γ-PGA production and its molecular weight increased by 56.7% and 19.4%, respectively. These results confirmed our hypothesis that suppressing the expression of MreB paralogs might reduce γ-PGA degradation, and that improving the cell size could strengthen γ-PGA synthesis. This is the first report of enhanced γ-PGA production via suppression of actin-like MreB paralogs., (© FEMS 2016. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

A Bacillus amyloliquefaciens strain with enhanced γ-PGA production was constructed by metabolically engineering its γ-PGA synthesis-related metabolic networks: by-products synthesis, γ-PGA degradation, glutamate precursor synthesis, γ-PGA synthesis and autoinducer synthesis. The genes involved in by-products synthesis were firstly deleted from the starting NK-1 strain. The obtained NK-E7 strain with deletions of the epsA-O (responsible for extracellular polysaccharide synthesis), sac (responsible for levan synthesis), lps (responsible for lipopolysaccharide synthesis) and pta (encoding phosphotransacetylase) genes, showed increased γ-PGA purity and slight increase of γ-PGA titer from 3.8 to 4.15 g/L. The γ-PGA degrading genes pgdS (encoding poly-gamma-glutamate depolymerase) and cwlO (encoding cell wall hydrolase) were further deleted. The obtained NK-E10 strain showed further increased γ-PGA production from 4.15 to 9.18 g/L. The autoinducer AI-2 synthetase gene luxS was deleted in NK-E10 strain and the resulting NK-E11 strain showed comparable γ-PGA titer to NK-E10 (from 9.18 to 9.54 g/L). In addition, we overexpressed the pgsBCA genes (encoding γ-PGA synthetase) in NK-E11 strain; however, the overexpression of these genes led to a decrease in γ-PGA production. Finally, the rocG gene (encoding glutamate dehydrogenase) and the glnA gene (glutamine synthetase) were repressed by the expression of synthetic small regulatory RNAs in NK-E11 strain. The rocG -repressed NK-anti-rocG strain exhibited the highest γ-PGA titer (11.04 g/L), which was 2.91-fold higher than that of the NK-1 strain. Fed-batch cultivation of the NK-anti-rocG strain resulted in a final γ-PGA titer of 20.3 g/L, which was 5.34-fold higher than that of the NK-1 strain in shaking flasks. This work is the first report of a systematically metabolic engineering approach that significantly enhanced γ-PGA production in a B. amyloliquefaciens strain. The engineering strategies explored here are also useful for engineering cell factories for the production of γ-PGA or of other valuable metabolites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We constructed a metabolically engineered glutamate-independent B acillus amyloliquefaciens strain with considerable γ- PGA production. It was carried out by double-deletion of the cwl O gene and eps A - O cluster, as well as insertion of the vgb gene in the bacteria chromosome. The final generated strain NK- PV elicited the highest production of γ- PGA (5.12 g l−1), which was 63.2% higher than that of the wild-type NK-1 strain (3.14 g l−1). The γ- PGA purity also improved in the NK- PV strain of 80.4% compared with 76.8% for the control. Experiments on bacterial biofilm formation experiment showed that NK-1 and NK-c (Δ cwl O) strains can form biofilm; the eps A - O deletion NK-7 and NK- PV strains could only form an incomplete biofilm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) is an important biopolymer with greatly potential in industrial and medical applications. In the present study, we constructed a metabolically engineered glutamate-independent Bacillus amyloliquefaciens LL3 strain with considerable γ-PGA production, which was carried out by single, double, and triple markerless deletions of three degradation genes pgdS, ggt, and cwlO. The highest γ-PGA production (7.12 g/L) was obtained from the pgdS and cwlO double-deletion strain NK-pc, which was 93 % higher than that of wild-type LL3 strain (3.69 g/L). The triple-gene-deletion strain NK-pgc showed a 28 % decrease in γ-PGA production, leading to a yield of 2.69 g/L. Furthermore, the cell morphologies of the mutant strains were also characterized. The cell length of cwlO deletion strains NK-c and NK-pc was shorter than that of the wild-type strain, while the ggt deletion strains NK-g, NK-pg, NK-gc, and NK-pgc showed longer cell lengths. This is the first report concerning the markerless deletion of γ-PGA degradation genes to improve γ-PGA production in a glutamate-independent strain and the first observation that γ-glutamyltranspeptidase (encoded by ggt) could be involved in the inhibition of cell elongation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oxygen is a limiting factor in the production of γ- PGA by the glutamic acid-independent strain Bacillus amyloliquefaciens LL3 because of the high viscosity of the culture broth. The vgb gene encoding Vitreoscilla hemoglobin ( VHb) was introduced into LL3 to overcome the low concentration of dissolved oxygen ( DO). First, recombinant plasmid p WHV was constructed by cloning vgb into the Bacillus expression vector pWH1520 and transformed into LL3. Carbon monoxide difference spectral analysis confirmed the expression of VHb. The γ- PGA yield of LL3 (p WHV) under the optimized fermentation conditions increased by 9.56%. To overcome the instability of pWH1520 and to establish stable expression of VHb, the engineered strain LL3-PVK was constructed by homologous recombination between the integration vector p KSVPVK and the 16S r RNA gene of LL3. The temperature-sensitive plasmid was used to perform the integration, which successfully circumvented the obstacle of the low transformation efficiency of B. amyloliquefaciens LL3. Bacillus amyloliquefaciens LL3-PVK showed an increase of 30% in γ-PGA production, while the biomass was increased by 7.9%. To our knowledge, this is the first report describing enhancement of γ-PGA production in a glutamic acid-independent strain as a result of vgb expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microbial levan is an important biopolymer with considerable potential in food and medical applications. Bacillus amyloliquefaciens NK-ΔLP strain can produce high-purity, low-molecular-weight levan, but production is relatively low. To enhance the production of levan, six extracellular protease genes (bpr, epr, mpr, vpr, nprE and aprE), together with the tasA gene (encoding the major biofilm matrix protein TasA) and the pgsBCA cluster (responsible for poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) synthesis), were intentionally knocked out in the Bacillus amyloliquefaciens NK-1 strain. The highest levan production (31.1 g/L) was obtained from the NK-Q-7 strain (ΔtasA, Δbpr, Δepr, Δmpr, Δvpr, ΔnprE, ΔaprE and ΔpgsBCA), which was 103% higher than that of the NK-ΔLP strain (ΔpgsBCA) (15.3 g/L). Furthermore, the NK-Q-7 strain also showed a 94.1% increase in α-amylase production compared with NK-ΔLP strain, suggesting a positive effect of extracellular protease genes deficient on the production of endogenously secreted proteins. This is the first report of the improvement of levan production in microbes deficient in extracellular proteases and TasA, and the NK-Q-7 strain exhibits outstanding characteristics for extracellular protein production or extracellular protein related product synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]