Regulation of the heme biosynthetic pathway for combinational biosynthesis of phycocyanobilin in Escherichia coli

Due to its biochemical and spectroscopic properties, phycocyanobilin (PCB) is of special interest for a variety of applications, but the production of PCB from Spirulina is complicated and costly. Here we report the assembly and regulation of the entire heme biosynthetic pathway for combinatorial biosynthesis of PCB in Escherichia coli. Our results shows that a plasmid containing bicistronic expression of hox1 and pcyA yields 6.64 mg/L PCB, which is higher than that of plasmid with one promoter for both genes (p