A novel process for obtaining pinosylvin using combinatorial bioengineering in Escherichia coli

Pinosylvin as a bioactive stilbene is of great interest for food supplements and pharmaceuticals development. In comparison to conventional extraction of pinosylvin from plant sources, biosynthesis engineering of microbial cell factories is a sustainable and flexible alternative method. Current synthetic strategies often require expensive phenylpropanoic precursor and inducer, which are not available for large-scale fermentation process. In this study, three bioengineering strategies were described to the development of a simple and economical process for pinosylvin biosynthesis in Escherichia coli. Firstly, we evaluated different construct environments to give a highly efficient constitutive system for enzymes of pinosylvin pathway expression: 4-coumarate: coenzyme A ligase (4CL) and stilbene synthase (STS). Secondly, malonyl coenzyme A (malonyl-CoA) is a key precursor of pinosylvin bioproduction and at low level in E. coli cell. Thus clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats interference (CRISPRi) was explored to inactivate malonyl-CoA consumption pathway to increase its availability. The resulting pinosylvin content in engineered E. coli was obtained a 1.9-fold increase depending on the repression of fabD (encoding malonyl-CoA-ACP transacylase) gene. Eventually, a phenylalanine over-producing E. coli consisting phenylalanine ammonia lyase was introduced to produce the precursor of pinosylvin, trans-cinnamic acid, the crude extraction of cultural medium was used as supplementation for pinosylvin bioproduction. Using these combinatorial processes, 47.49 mg/L pinosylvin was produced from glycerol.