"Metabolic Engineering of Bacillus Subtilis for the Production of 3-Hydroxypropionic Acid"

"METABOLIC ENGINEERING OF
BACILLUS SUBTILIS FOR THE PRODUCTION OF 3-HYDROXYPROPIONIC ACID"

Aida Kalantari, Boyang
Ji, Ivan Mijakovic

Over the past few years a major interest is
focused on the substitution of petrochemical products by processing bio-products
from renewable raw materials. In this context, our project focuses on the
production of 3-Hydroxypropionic acid (3-HP) from glycerol. 3-HP is one of the
top-valued platform chemicals used for the production of many industrially
important chemicals such as acrylic acid, and glycerol is a relatively cheap
byproduct of biodiesel industry. 3-HP can be produced by several microorganisms
which possess glycerol dehydratase (dhaB) and aldehyde dehydrogenase (aldH)
genes, however, bio-production of 3-HP has never reached a commercially
exploitable level. In this project, we explore the possibility of synthesizing
3-HP for the first time in Bacillus subtilis, by inserting the
heterologous production pathway. The key advantages of B. subtilis are
its ability to grow efficiently on glycerol and reach very high cell densities
in bioreactors. Our genetically engineered B. subtilis contains dhaB
and aldH genes from Lactobacillus reuteri and Klebsiella
pneumonia. Metabolic network of B. subtilis was optimized in
silico to guide our metabolic engineering strategy in vivo which
resulted in 3-HP producing B. subtilis strains.