Establishing a versatile toolkit of flux enhanced strains and cell extracts for pathway prototyping

Building and optimizing biosynthetic pathways in engineered cells holds promise to address societal needs in energy, materials, and medicine, but it is often time-consuming. Cell-free synthetic biology has emerged as a powerful tool to accelerate design-build-test-learn cycles for pathway engineering with increased tolerance to toxic compounds. However, most cell-free pathway prototyping to date has been performed in extracts from wildtype cells which often do not have sufficient flux towards the pathways of interest, which can be enhanced by engineering. Here, to address this gap, we create a set of engineered Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains rewired via CRISPR-dCas9 to achieve high-flux toward key metabolic precursors; namely, acetyl-CoA, shikimate, triose-phosphate, oxaloacetate, α-ketoglutarate, and glucose-6-phosphate. Cell-free extracts generated from these strains are used for targeted enzyme screening in vitro. As model systems, we assess in vivo and in vitro production of triacetic acid lactone from acetyl-CoA and muconic acid from the shikimate pathway. The need for these platforms is exemplified by the fact that muconic acid cannot be detected in wildtype extracts provided with the same biosynthetic enzymes. We also perform metabolomic comparison to understand biochemical differences between the cellular and cell-free muconic acid synthesis systems (E. coli and S. cerevisiae cells and cell extracts with and without metabolic rewiring). While any given pathway has different interfaces with metabolism, we anticipate that this set of pre-optimized, flux enhanced cell extracts will enable prototyping efforts for new biosynthetic pathways and the discovery of biochemical functions of enzymes.