Engineering Corynebacterium glutamicum for fast production of lysine and pipecolic acid

The Gram-positive soil bacterium Corynebacterium glutamicum is widely used in industrial fermentative processes for the production of amino acids. The world production of L-lysine has surpassed 2 million tons per year. Glucose is taken up into the C. glutamicum cell by the phosphotransferase system PTS which can be replaced and/or enhanced by a permease and a glucokinase. Heterologous expression of the gene for the high-affinity glucose permease from Streptomyces coelicolor and of the Bacillus subitilis glucokinase gene fully compensated for the absence of the PTS in hpr strains and strains grew as fast with glucose as C. glutamicum wild type. Growth of PTS-positive strains with glucose was accelerated when the endogenous inositol permease IolT2 and the glucokinase from Bacillus subtilis were overproduced using plasmid pEKEx3-IolTBest. When the genome-reduced C. glutamicum strain GRLys1 carrying additional in-frame deletions of sugR and ldhA to derepress glycolytic and PTS genes and to circumvent formation of L-lactate as by-product was transformed with this plasmid, a 40% higher L-lysine titer and a 30% higher volumetric productivity as compared to GRLys1(pEKEx3) resulted. The non-proteinogenic amino acid pipecolic acid (L-PA), a precursor of immunosuppressants, peptide antibiotics or piperidine alkaloids, can be derived from L-lysine. To enable production of L-PA by the L-lysine producing strain, the L-Lysine dehydrogenase gene lysDH from Silicibacter pomeroyi and the endogenous pyrroline 5-carboxylate reductase gene proC were expressed as synthetic operon. This enabled C. glutamicum to L-PA with a yield of 0.49 ± 0.03 gg-1 and a volumetric productivity of 0.04 ± 0.00 gL-1h-1.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fermentative process for the production of L-PA. Two conditions tested, 200 mM NaCl Vs 200 mM pipecolic supplemented in the culture medium, control experiments done with the addition of 200mM of NaCl. Four technical replicates.