An upgraded Myxococcus xanthus chassis with enhanced growth characteristics for efficient genetic manipulation

Abstract

Myxobacteria are well known for multicellular social behaviors and valued for biosynthesis of natural products. Myxobacteria social behaviors such as clumping growth severely hamper strain cultivation and genetic manipulation. Using Myxococcus xanthus DK1622, we engineered Hu04, which is deficient in multicellular behavior and pigmentation. Hu04, while maintaining nutritional growth and a similar metabolic background, exhibits improved dispersed growth, streamlining operational procedures. It achieves high cell densities in culture and is promising for synthetic biology applications.

Keywords

Myxococcus xanthus / Operation deficiency / Phenotypic optimization / Chassis / Genetic performance

Data availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and its supplementary information files or are available upon request.

Declaration of Competing Interest

Given his role as editorial board member, Dr. Yuezhong Li, had no involvement in the peer-review of this article and has no access to information regarding its peer-review. Full responsibility for the editorial process for this article was delegated to Dr. Shengbiao Hu.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Weifeng Hu: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Yan Wang: Visualization, Validation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Xiaoran Yue: Methodology, Data curation. Weiwei Xue: Methodology, Data curation. Wei Hu: Validation, Formal analysis. Xinjing Yue: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Funding acquisition. Yuezhong Li: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Acknowledgments

We thank Zhi-feng Li, Jing Zhu, Cheng-jia Zhang, and Qi Chen of the Core Facilities for Life and Environmental Sciences, State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology of Shandong University, for providing the AKTA Avant FPLC (AKTAavant), FESEM (Quanta 250 FEG), and a Parallel Bioreactor (Multifors 2).

This study was financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFC2101000) and the Na- tional Natural Science Foundation of China (32070030 and 32301220).

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