中国台湾“中研院”James C. Liao课题组成功将大肠杆菌转化为仅依靠甲醇生长的合成甲基营养菌。相关论文于2020年8月10日在线发表于《细胞》。

Title: Converting Escherichia coli to a Synthetic Methylotroph Growing Solely on Methanol

Author: Frederic Y.-H. Chen, Hsin-Wei Jung, Chao-Yin Tsuei, James C. Liao

Issue&Volume: 2020-08-10

Abstract: Methanol, being electron rich and derivable from methane or CO2, is a potentially renewable one-carbon (C1) feedstock for microorganisms. Althoughthe ribulose monophosphate (RuMP) cycle used by methylotrophs to assimilate methanoldiffers from the typical sugar metabolism by only three enzymes, turning a non-methylotrophicorganism to a synthetic methylotroph that grows to a high cell density has been challenging.Here we reprogrammed E. coli using metabolic robustness criteria followed by laboratory evolution to establisha strain that can efficiently utilize methanol as the sole carbon source. This syntheticmethylotroph alleviated a so far uncharacterized hurdle, DNA-protein crosslinking(DPC), by insertion sequence (IS)-mediated copy number variations (CNVs) and balancedthe metabolic flux by mutations. Being capable of growing at a rate comparable withnatural methylotrophs in a wide range of methanol concentrations, this synthetic methylotrophicstrain illustrates genome editing and evolution for microbial tropism changes andexpands the scope of biological C1 conversion.

DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.07.010

Source: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30875-8