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Metabolic engineering of Clostridium tyrobutyricum for n-butanol production from sugarcane juice

  • Bioenergy and biofuels
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Abstract

Clostridium tyrobutyricum is a promising organism for butyrate and n-butanol production, but cannot grow on sucrose. Three genes (scrA, scrB, and scrK) involved in the sucrose catabolic pathway, along with an aldehyde/alcohol dehydrogenase gene, were cloned from Clostridium acetobutylicum and introduced into C. tyrobutyricum (Δack) with acetate kinase knockout. In batch fermentation, the engineered strain Ct(Δack)-pscrBAK produced 14.8–18.8 g/L butanol, with a high butanol/total solvent ratio of ∼0.94 (w/w), from sucrose and sugarcane juice. Moreover, stable high butanol production with a high butanol yield of 0.25 g/g and productivity of 0.28 g/L∙h was obtained in batch fermentation without using antibiotics for selection pressure, suggesting that Ct(Δack)-pscrBAK is genetically stable. Furthermore, sucrose utilization by Ct(Δack)-pscrBAK was not inhibited by glucose, which would usually cause carbon catabolite repression on solventogenic clostridia. Ct(Δack)-pscrBAK is thus advantageous for use in biobutanol production from sugarcane juice and other sucrose-rich feedstocks.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation STTR program (IIP-1026648). Financial support from China Scholarship Council to Zhang (201406350172) for research visit at OSU is also acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bioresource Utilization Laboratory, College of Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing, 100083, People’s Republic of China

    Jianzhi Zhang & Qiaojuan Yan

  2. William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University, 151 West Woodruff Ave., Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Jianzhi Zhang, Le Yu, Mengmeng Xu & Shang-Tian Yang

  3. Bioprocessing Innovative Company, 4734 Bridle Path Ct, Dublin, OH, 43017, USA

    Meng Lin & I-Ching Tang

Authors
  1. Jianzhi Zhang
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  2. Le Yu
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  4. Shang-Tian Yang
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  5. Qiaojuan Yan
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  6. Meng Lin
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  7. I-Ching Tang
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Correspondence to Shang-Tian Yang.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

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Jianzhi Zhang and Le Yu contributed equally to this work.

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Zhang, J., Yu, L., Xu, M. et al. Metabolic engineering of Clostridium tyrobutyricum for n-butanol production from sugarcane juice. Appl Microbiol Biotechnol 101, 4327–4337 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-017-8200-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00253-017-8200-1

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