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Significance Methane, the major natural-gas component, can be converted industrially to syngas (a mixture of CO 2 , CO, and H 2 ), which is used to produce methanol, an important industrial precursor for producing commodity and specialty chemicals. Unlike methanol’s chemical conversion, which requires high temperature and pressure, its biological conversion, proceeding through its oxidation to formaldehyde, takes place at ambient conditions but suffers from relative low rates. As metabolite biosynthesis by industrial organisms utilizes NADH as an electron donor, methanol oxidation must be carried out by NAD-dependent methanol dehydrogenases, which have poor thermodynamic characteristics at mesophilic conditions. To solve this problem, we developed an engineering strategy for supramolecular enzyme assembly to dramatically enhance the carbon flux from methanol to the key intermediate fructose-6-phosphate.
Price et al. (Mon,) studied this question.