Regulating C4-dicarboxylate transporters for improving fumaric acid production

Abstract

Although many efforts have been made to engineer Escherichia coli for fumaric acid production, the fumarate efflux system has not been investigated as an engineering target to improve fumaric acid production. In this work, we cloned and expressed C4-dicarboxylate transporters of different sources in a previously constructed fumaric-acid-producing strain to study their effects on the production of fumaric acid. In addition, each native C4-dicarboxylate transporter was deleted in separate experiments to investigate their individual effects on fumaric acid production. The results showed that the expression of the genes dcuB-Ec and dcuC-Ec can increase the fumaric acid yield by 48.5% and 53.1%, respectively. Fed-batch cultivations in a 5 L bioreactor of strain A-dcuB-Ec produced 9.42 g L⁻¹ of fumaric acid after 50 hours.