Escherichia coli deletion mutants illuminate trade-offs between growth rate and flux through a foreign anabolic pathway.

Autor: Falls KC; Department of Biochemistry, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America., Williams AL; Department of Biochemistry, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America., Bryksin AV; Department of Biochemistry, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America., Matsumura I; Department of Biochemistry, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PloS one [PLoS One] 2014 Feb 04; Vol. 9 (2), pp. e88159. Date of Electronic Publication: 2014 Feb 04 (Print Publication: 2014).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0088159
Abstrakt: Metabolic engineers strive to improve the production yields of microbial fermentations, sometimes by mutating the genomes of production strains. Some mutations are detrimental to the health of the organism, so a quantitative and mechanistic understanding of the trade-offs could inform better designs. We employed the bacterial luciferase operon (luxABCDE), which uses ubiquitous energetic cofactors (NADPH, ATP, FMNH2, acetyl-CoA) from the host cell, as a proxy for a novel anabolic pathway. The strains in the Escherichia coli Keio collection, each of which contains a single deletion of a non-essential gene, represent mutational choices that an engineer might make to optimize fermentation yields. The Keio strains and the parental BW25113 strain were transformed with a luxABCDE expression vector. Each transformant was propagated in defined M9 medium at 37 °C for 48 hours; the cell density (optical density at 600 nanometers, OD600) and luminescence were measured every 30 minutes. The trade-offs were visualized by plotting the maximum growth rate and luminescence/OD600 of each transformant across a "production possibility frontier". Our results show that some loss-of-function mutations enhance growth in vitro or light production, but that improvement in one trait generally comes at the expense of the other.
Databáze: MEDLINE