TITLE:
Metabolic Engineering of Thermoanaerobacterium thermosaccharolyticum for Increased n-Butanol Production
AUTHORS:
Ashwini Bhandiwad, Anna Guseva, Lee Lynd
KEYWORDS:
Biofuels; n-Butanol; Thermophile; Metabolic Engineering
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Microbiology,
Vol.3 No.1,
March
27,
2013
ABSTRACT: Thermoanaerobacterium
thermosaccharolyticum shows promise as a host for
n-butanol production since it natively has the required genes involved in the
n-butanol biosynthetic pathway. Overexpression of the natively occurring bcs operon containing the genes thl, hbd, crt, bcd, etfA, and etfB responsible for the formation of butyryl CoA increased the n-butanol
production by 180% compared to the wild type from a n-butanol titer of 1.8 mM to
5.1 mM. The deletion of one of the six alcohol dehydrogenase genes
confirmed that it was the primary gene responsible for ethanol and n-butanol
production from acetyl CoA and butyryl CoA respectively.