High-yield production of meso-2,3-butanediol from cellodextrin by engineered E. coli biocatalysts

Escherichia coli has been engineered to produce a variety of biofuel and biorefinery products. However, it can only produce these products from simple sugars, requiring large amounts of enzymes to depolymerize cellulose into monomer sugars. Engineering E. coli to directly use cellodextrin, the partial hydrolysis product of cellulose, potentially could reduce the requirement of enzyme thereby the overall cost. Through a combination of gene deletion, introduction of a synthetic operon, and periplasmic expression of a Saccharophagus cellodextrinase, we engineered, for the first time, an E. coli biocatalyst capable of producing BDO from cellodextrin. The success of the engineering strategy is evidenced by the high BDO yield (>80%) from cellodextrin. We additionally demonstrate that the engineered biocatalyst can be advantageously used in a SSF process for BDO production from cellulose as the expression of cellodextrinase from a BDO producer augments the insufficient β-glucosidase activities in a commercial cellulase cocktail.