An engineered non-oxidative glycolysis pathway for acetone production in Escherichia coli

To find new metabolic engineering strategies to improve the yield of acetone in Escherichia coli.

Results of flux balance analysis from a modified Escherichia coli genome-scale metabolic network suggested that the introduction of a non-oxidative glycolysis (NOG) pathway would improve the theoretical acetone yield from 1 to 1.5 mol acetone/mol glucose. By inserting the fxpk gene encoding phosphoketolase from Bifidobacterium adolescentis into the genome, we constructed a NOG pathway in E.coli. The resulting strain produced 47 mM acetone from glucose under aerobic conditions in shake-flasks. The yield of acetone was improved from 0.38 to 0.47 mol acetone/mol glucose which is a significant over the parent strain.

Guided by computational analysis of metabolic networks, we introduced a NOG pathway into E. coli and increased the yield of acetone, which demonstrates the importance of modeling analysis for the novel metabolic engineering strategies.