Metabolic engineering of a synergistic pathway for n-butanol production in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Abstract

n-Butanol has several favourable properties as an advanced fuel or a platform chemical. Bio-based production of n-butanol is becoming increasingly important for sustainable chemical industry. Synthesis of n-butanol can be achieved via more than one metabolic pathway. Here we report the metabolic engineering of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce n-butanol through a synergistic pathway: the endogenous threonine pathway and the introduced citramalate pathway. Firstly, we characterized and optimized the endogenous threonine pathway; then, a citramalate synthase (CimA) mediated pathway was introduced to construct the synergistic pathway; next, the synergistic pathway was optimized by additional overexpression of relevant genes identified previously; meanwhile, the n-butanol production was also improved by overexpression of keto-acid decarboxylases (KDC) and alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). After combining these strategies with co-expression of LEU1 (two copies), LEU4, LEU2 (two copies), LEU5, CimA, NFS1, ADH7 and ARO10^*, we achieved an n-butanol production of 835 mg/L in the final engineered strain, which is almost 7-fold increase compared to the initial strain. Furthermore, the production showed a 3-fold of the highest titer ever reported in yeast. Therefore, the engineered yeast strain represents a promising alternative platform for n-butanol production.