Biotransformation of p-xylene into terephthalic acid by engineered Escherichia coli

Zi Wei Luo and Sang Yup Lee ()
Additional contact information
Zi Wei Luo: Metabolic and Biomolecular Engineering National Research Laboratory, Center for Systems and Synthetic Biotechnology, Institute for the BioCentury, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
Sang Yup Lee: Metabolic and Biomolecular Engineering National Research Laboratory, Center for Systems and Synthetic Biotechnology, Institute for the BioCentury, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Terephthalic acid (TPA) is an important industrial chemical currently produced by energy intensive and potentially hazardous p-xylene (pX) oxidation process. Here we report the development of metabolically engineered Escherichia coli system for biological transformation of pX into TPA. The engineered E. coli strain harbours a synthetic TPA pathway optimized through manipulation of expression levels of upstream and downstream modules. The upstream pathway converts pX to p-toluic acid (pTA) and the downstream pathway transforms pTA to TPA. In a two-phase partitioning fermentation, the engineered strain converts 8.8 g pX into 13.3 g TPA, which corresponds to a conversion yield of 96.7 mol%. These results suggest that the E. coli system presented here might be a promising alternative for the large-scale biotechnological production of TPA and lays the foundations for the future development of sustainable approaches for TPA production.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15689 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms15689

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15689

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().