In silico characterization of microbial electrosynthesis for metabolic engineering of biochemicals

Microbial Cell Factories

Research

Aditya V Pandit¹  Radhakrishnan Mahadevan² 

[1] Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto, 200 College Street, M5S 3E5, Toronto, Canada;Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto, 200 College Street, Toronto, M5S 3E5 Canada; Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto, 164 College Street, M5T 1P7, Toronto, Canada;

关键词: Biomass Yield;    Microbial Fuel Cell;    Shewanella;    Flux Balance Analysis;    Strain Design;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1475-2859-10-76

 received in 2011-03-04, accepted in 2011-10-03,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundA critical concern in metabolic engineering is the need to balance the demand and supply of redox intermediates such as NADH. Bioelectrochemical techniques offer a novel and promising method to alleviate redox imbalances during the synthesis of biochemicals and biofuels. Broadly, these techniques reduce intracellular NAD+ to NADH and therefore manipulate the cell's redox balance. The cellular response to such redox changes and the additional reducing power available to the cell can be harnessed to produce desired metabolites. In the context of microbial fermentation, these bioelectrochemical techniques can be used to improve product yields and/or productivity.ResultsWe have developed a method to characterize the role of bioelectrosynthesis in chemical production using the genome-scale metabolic model of E. coli. The results in this paper elucidate the role of bioelectrosynthesis and its impact on biomass growth, cellular ATP yields and biochemical production. The results also suggest that strain design strategies can change for fermentation processes that employ microbial electrosynthesis and suggest that dynamic operating strategies lead to maximizing productivity.ConclusionsThe results in this paper provide a systematic understanding of the benefits and limitations of bioelectrochemical techniques for biochemical production and highlight how electrical enhancement can impact cellular metabolism and biochemical production.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Pandit and Mahadevan; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011