Programming Saposin-Mediated Compensatory Metabolic Sinks for Enhanced Ubiquinone Production

Microbial synthesis of ubiquinone by fermentation processes has been emerging in recent years. However, as ubiquinone is a primary metabolite that is tightly regulated by the host central metabolism, tweaking the individual pathway components could only result in a marginal improvement on the ubiquinone production. Given that ubiquinone is stored in the lipid bilayer, we hypothesized that introducing additional metabolic sink for storing ubiquinone might improve the CoQ₁₀ production. As human lipid binding/transfer protein saposin B (hSapB) was reported to extract ubiquinone from the lipid bilayer and form the water-soluble complex, hSapB was chosen to build a compensatory metabolic sink for the ubiquinone storage. As a proof-of-concept, hSapB-mediated metabolic sink systems were devised and systematically investigated in the model organism of Escherichia coli. The hSapB-mediated periplasmic sink resulted in more than 200% improvement of CoQ₈ over the wild type strain. Further investigation revealed that hSapB-mediated sink systems could also improve the CoQ₁₀ production in a CoQ₁₀-hyperproducing E. coli strain obtained by a modular pathway rewiring approach. As the design principles and the engineering strategies reported here are generalizable to other microbes, compensatory sink systems will be a method of significant interest to the synthetic biology community.