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Heterologous expression of two Aspergillus niger feruloyl esterases in Trichoderma reesei for the production of ferulic acid from wheat bran

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Abstract

Feruloyl esterase (FAE)-encoding genes AnfaeA and AnfaeB were isolated from Aspergillus niger 0913. For overexpression of the two genes in Trichoderma reesei, constitutive and inductive expression plasmids were constructed based on parental plasmid pAg1-H3. The constructed plasmids contained AnfaeA or AnfaeB gene under the control of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase A gene (gpdA) promoter (from A. nidulans) or cellobiohydrolases I (cbh I) gene promoter (from T. reesei), and cbh I terminator from T. reesei. The target plasmids were transferred into T. reesei D-86271 (Rut-C30) by Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation (ATMT), respectively. A high level of feruloyl esterase was produced by the recombinant fungal strains under solid-state fermentation, and the cbh I promoter was more efficient than the gpdA promoter in the expression of AnfaeA. The optimum temperatures and pH values were 50 °C and 5.0 for AnFAEA, and 35 °C and 6.0 for AnFAEB. The maximum production levels were 20.69 U/gsd for AnFAEA and 15.08 U/gsd for AnFAEB. The recombinant fungal enzyme systems could release 62.9% (for AnFAEA) and 52.2% (for AnFAEB) of total ferulic acids from de-starched wheat bran, which was higher than the 46.3% releasing efficiency of A. niger 0913. The supplement of xylanase from T. longibrachiatum in the enzymatic hydrolysis led to a small increment of the ferulic acids release.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Prof. Gang Liu (Institute of Microbiology, CAS) for providing the plasmid pAg1-H3 and Agrobacterium tumefaciens AGL-1. This work was supported by grants from a 948 Research Project (No. 2013-4-16) from the State Forestry Administration of China, the Natural Science Fund for Provincial Colleges and University of Jiangsu Province, China (15KJB220003), the Research Fund for the Advanced Talents, Nanjing Forestry University (GXL201311) and the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions.

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  1. Liangkun Long, Haoyuan Zhao and Dafan Ding contributed equally to this work.

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  1. College of Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, 210037, China

    Liangkun Long, Haoyuan Zhao, Dafan Ding, Meijuan Xu & Shaojun Ding

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  1. Liangkun Long
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Correspondence to Shaojun Ding.

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Long, L., Zhao, H., Ding, D. et al. Heterologous expression of two Aspergillus niger feruloyl esterases in Trichoderma reesei for the production of ferulic acid from wheat bran. Bioprocess Biosyst Eng 41, 593–601 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-018-1894-3

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