Redesigning regulatory components of quorum-sensing system for diverse metabolic control

Quorum sensing (QS) is a ubiquitous cell-cell communication mechanism that can be employed to autonomously and dynamically control metabolic fluxes. However, since the functions of genetic components in the circuits are not fully understood, the developed QS circuits are still less sophisticated for regulating multiple sets of genes or operons in metabolic engineering applications. Here, we discover the regulatory roles of a CRP-binding site and the lux box to -10 region within luxR-luxI intergenic sequence in controlling the lux-type QS promoters. By varying the numbers of the CRP-binding site and redesigning the lux box to -10 site sequence, we create a library of QS variants that possess both high dynamic ranges and low leakiness. These circuits are successfully applied to achieve diverse metabolic control in salicylic acid and 4-hydroxycoumarin biosynthetic pathways in Escherichia coli. This work expands the toolbox for dynamic control of multiple metabolic fluxes under complex metabolic background and presents paradigms to engineer metabolic pathways for high-level synthesis of target products.