Efficient biosynthesis of ectoine in engineered Vibrio natriegens

The compatible solute ectoine, an amino acid derivative, was initially discovered to be a critical factor conferring high resistance to harsh environments in which the producer microbes subsist. Its diverse chemical and biomedical properties have made ectoine a star molecule, necessitating environmentally friendly and efficient preparation methods. In this study, we cloned a biosynthetic gene cluster from a strain screened from samples collected from a historic sea-salt plant. This gene cluster supports inducible heterogeneous ectoine synthesis controlled by the T7 promoter in the recombinant halophile host Vibrio natriegens Vmax × 2. Investigation of the dosage effect of each gene in the cluster on ectoine synthesis identified ectC as the most important gene. We performed in silico directed evolution and Pythia analysis to design ectC mutants and screen those that positively contribute to ectoine synthesis. We used a sequence-generating tool to design degenerated EctC coding sequences to ensure EctC levels in recombinant V. natriegens. Ectoine synthesis was validated in a 5-L stirring fermenter. A titer of 56.47 g/L ectoine was achieved in 28 h through feed batch fermentation. This study demonstrated the power of protein language model-guided metabolic enzyme design and codon adaptation index-based coding sequence selection in biosynthesis pathway engineering. It also offers an example of ectoine biosynthesis in the rising star halophile host V. natriegens, contributing significantly to microbiology and biotechnology.