Microbial production of levulinic acid from glucose by engineered Pseudomonas putida KT2440

Levulinic acid(LA) is produced through acid-catalyzed hydrolysis and dehydration of lignocellulosic biomass. It is a key platform chemical used as an intermediate in various industries including biofuels, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and polymers. Traditional LA production uses chemical conversion, which requires high temperatures and pressures, strong acids, and produces undesirable side reactions, repolymerization products, and waste problems Therefore, we designed an integrated process to produce LA from glucose through metabolic engineering of Pseudomonas putida KT2440. As a metabolic engineering strategy, codon optimized phospho-2-dehydro-3-deoxyheptonate aldolase (AroG), 3-dehydroshikimate dehydratase (AsbF), and acetoacetate decarboxylase (Adc) were introduced to express genes of the shikimate and β-ketoadipic acid pathways, and the 3-oxoadipate CoA-transferase (pcaIJ) gene was deleted to prevent loss of biosynthetic intermediates. To increase the accumulation of the produced LA, the lva operon encoding levulinyl-CoA synthetase (LvaE) was deleted resulting in the high LA-producing strain P. putida HP203. Culture conditions such as medium, temperature, glucose concentration, and nitrogen source were optimized, and under optimal conditions, P. putida HP203 strain biosynthesized 36.3 mM (4.2 g/L) LA from glucose in a fed-batch fermentation system. When lignocellulosic biomass hydrolysate was used as the substrate, this strain produced 7.31 mM of LA. This is the first report of microbial production of LA from glucose by P. putida. This study suggests the possibility of manipulating biosynthetic pathway to produce biological products from glucose for various applications.