High-efficiency production of 5-hydroxyectoine using metabolically engineered Corynebacterium glutamicum

BACKGROUND

Extremolytes enable microbes to withstand even the most extreme conditions in nature. Due to their unique protective properties, the small organic molecules, more and more, become high-value active ingredients for the cosmetics and the pharmaceutical industries. While ectoine, the industrial extremolyte flagship, has been successfully commercialized before, an economically viable route to its highly interesting derivative 5-hydroxyectoine (hydroxyectoine) is not existing.

RESULTS

Here, we demonstrate high-level hydroxyectoine production, using metabolically engineered strains of C. glutamicum that express a codon-optimized, heterologous ectD gene, encoding for ectoine hydroxylase, to convert supplemented ectoine in the presence of sucrose as growth substrate into the desired derivative. Fourteen out of sixteen codon-optimized ectD variants from phylogenetically diverse bacterial and archaeal donors enabled hydroxyectoine production, showing the strategy to work almost regardless of the origin of the gene. The genes from Pseudomonas stutzeri (PST) and Mycobacterium smegmatis (MSM) worked best and enabled hydroxyectoine production up to 97% yield. Metabolic analyses revealed high enrichment of the ectoines inside the cells, which, inter alia, reduced the synthesis of other compatible solutes, including proline and trehalose. After further optimization, C. glutamicum Ptuf ectD^PST achieved a titre of 74 g L^-1 hydroxyectoine at 70% selectivity within 12 h, using a simple batch process. In a two-step procedure, hydroxyectoine production from ectoine, previously synthesized fermentatively with C. glutamicum ectABC^opt, was successfully achieved without intermediate purification.

CONCLUSIONS

C. glutamicum is a well-known and industrially proven host, allowing the synthesis of commercial products with granted GRAS status, a great benefit for a safe production of hydroxyectoine as active ingredient for cosmetic and pharmaceutical applications. Because ectoine is already available at commercial scale, its use as precursor appears straightforward. In the future, two-step processes might provide hydroxyectoine de novo from sugar.

Ectoine hydroxylase displays selective trans-3-hydroxylation activity towards L-proline

L-Hydroxyproline (Hyp) is a valuable intermediate for the synthesis of pharmaceuticals; consequently, a practical process for its production has been in high demand. To date, industrial processes have been developed by using L-Pro hydroxylases. However, a process for the synthesis of trans-3-Hyp has not yet been established, because of the lack of highly selective enzymes that can convert L-Pro to trans-3-Hyp. The present study was designed to develop a biocatalytic trans-3-Hyp production process. We speculated that ectoine hydroxylase (EctD), which is involved in the hydroxylation of the known compatible solute ectoine, may possess the ability to hydroxylate L-Pro, since the structures of ectoine and 5-hydroxyectoine resemble those of L-Pro and trans-3-Hyp, respectively. Consequently, we discovered that ectoine hydroxylases from Halomonas elongata, as well as some actinobacteria, catalyzed L-Pro hydroxylation to form trans-3-Hyp. Of these, ectoine hydroxylase from Streptomyces cattleya also utilized 3,4-dehydro-L-Pro, 2-methyl-L-Pro, and L-pipecolic acid as substrates. In the whole-cell bioconversion of L-Pro into trans-3-Hyp using Escherichia coli expressing the ectD gene from S. cattleya, only 12.4 mM trans-3-Hyp was produced from 30 mM L-Pro, suggesting a rapid depletion of 2-oxoglutarate, an essential component of enzyme activity as a cosubstrate, in the host. Therefore, the endogenous 2-oxoglutarate dehydrogenase gene was deleted. Using this deletion mutant as the host, trans-3-Hyp production was enhanced up to 26.8 mM from 30 mM L-Pro, with minimal loss of 2-oxoglutarate. This finding is not only beneficial for trans-3-Hyp production, but also for other E. coli bioconversion processes involving 2-oxoglutarate-utilizing enzymes.