Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Yang, Yaping
• Lin, Yuheng
• Li, Lingyun
• Linhardt, Robert J.
• Yan, Yajun

Titel

Regulating malonyl-CoA metabolism via synthetic antisense RNAs for enhanced biosynthesis of natural products

Ist Teil von

• Metabolic engineering, 2015-05, Vol.29, p.217-226

Ort / Verlag

Belgium: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Malonyl-CoA is the building block for fatty acid biosynthesis and also a precursor to various pharmaceutically and industrially valuable molecules, such as polyketides and biopolymers. However, intracellular malonyl-CoA is usually maintained at low levels, which poses great challenges to efficient microbial production of malonyl-CoA derived molecules. Inactivation of the malonyl-CoA consumption pathway to increase its intracellular availability is not applicable, since it is usually lethal to microorganisms. In this work, we employ synthetic antisense RNAs (asRNAs) to conditionally down-regulate fatty acid biosynthesis and achieve malonyl-CoA enrichment in Escherichia coli. The optimized asRNA constructs with a loop-stem structure exhibit high interference efficiency up to 80%, leading to a 4.5-fold increase in intracellular malonyl-CoA concentration when fabD gene expression is inhibited. Strikingly, this strategy allows the improved production of natural products 4-hydroxycoumarin, resveratrol, and naringenin by 2.53-, 1.70-, and 1.53-fold in E. coli, respectively. In addition, down-regulation of other fab genes including fabH, fabB, and fabF also leads to remarkable increases in 4-hydroxycoumarin production. This study demonstrates a novel strategy to enhance intracellular malonyl-CoA and indicates the effectiveness of asRNA as a powerful tool for use in metabolic engineering. •Development of antisense RNA tools with high interference efficiency up to 80%.•Conditional down-regulation of fatty acid biosynthesis.•4.5-fold increase in intracellular malonyl-CoA concentration.•Application of the asRNA tool in improvement of natural products production.•A versatile strategy for manipulating essential genes in metabolic engineering.