Heterologous expression of Vibrio natriegens transporters enhances the growth of Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis on glutamate

Abstract

Bacterial growth modulation is crucial in microbial synthetic biology. In this study, we found that glutamate is an extremely poor carbon source for Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. The slow growth on glutamate can be effectively overcome by the heterologous expression of glutamate transporters from Vibrio natriegens. Our results revealed that cross-species substrate transporters could be employed to shift bacterial cellular resource allocation, offering a potential genetic strategy for modulating microbial biomass growth.

Keywords

Cell growth / Vibrio natriegens / Resource allocation / Glutamate transporters / Synthetic biology

Data availability statement

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article and its supplementary information files or are available upon request. The mass spectrometry proteomics data have been deposited to the ProteomeXchange Consortium via the iProX partner repository with the dataset identifier: PXD069464.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Fei Han: Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Qian Wang: Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. Yiheng Wang: Investigation. Xingyu Liu: Investigation. Yifan Zhang: Investigation. Kunlong Liang: Investigation. Xiongfeng Dai: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Manlu Zhu: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Xiongfeng Dai reports financial support was provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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