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Engineering microbial biofuel tolerance and export using efflux pumps.
- Source :
- Molecular Systems Biology; 2011, Vol. 7 Issue 1, p1-N.PAG, 7p, 1 Diagram, 2 Graphs
- Publication Year :
- 2011
-
Abstract
- Many compounds being considered as candidates for advanced biofuels are toxic to microorganisms. This introduces an undesirable trade-off when engineering metabolic pathways for biofuel production because the engineered microbes must balance production against survival. Cellular export systems, such as efflux pumps, provide a direct mechanism for reducing biofuel toxicity. To identify novel biofuel pumps,we used bioinformatics to generate a list of all efflux pumps from sequenced bacterial genomes and prioritized a subset of targets for cloning. The resulting library of 43 pumps was heterologously expressed in Escherichia coli, where we tested it against seven representative biofuels. By using a competitive growth assay, we efficiently distinguished pumps that improved survival. For two of the fuels (n-butanol and isopentanol), none of the pumps improved tolerance. For all other fuels, we identified pumps that restored growth in the presence of biofuel. We then tested a beneficial pump directly in a production strain and demonstrated that it improved biofuel yields. Our findings introduce new tools for engineering production strains and utilize the increasingly large database of sequenced genomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 17444292
- Volume :
- 7
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Molecular Systems Biology
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 131652509
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1038/msb.2011.21