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Apocarotenoids, such as α-, β-ionone, and retinol, have high commercial values in the food and cosmetic industries. The demand for natural ingredients has been increasing dramatically in recent years. However, attempts to overproduce β-ionone in microorganisms have been limited by the complexity of the biosynthetic pathway. Here, an Escherichia coli-based modular system was developed to produce various apocarotenoids. Incorporation of enzyme engineering approaches (N-terminal truncation and protein fusion) into modular metabolic engineering strategy significantly improved α-ionone production from 0.5 mg/L to 30 mg/L in flasks, producing 480 mg/L of α-ionone in fed-batch fermentation. By modifying apocarotenoid genetic module, this platform strain was successfully re-engineered to produce 32 mg/L and 500 mg/L of β-ionone in flask and bioreactor, respectively (>80-fold higher than previously reported). Similarly, 33 mg/L of retinoids was produced in flask by reconstructing apocarotenoid module, demonstrating the versatility of the "plug-n-play" modular system. Collectively, this study highlights the importance of the strategy of simultaneous modular pathway optimization and enzyme engineering to overproduce valuable chemicals in microbes.
Zhang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.