Engineering Corynebacterium glutamicum for Geraniol Production

Abstract

Geraniol is a monoterpenoid alcohol with various applications in food, cosmetics, and healthcare. Corynebacterium glutamicum is a potential platform for terpenoids production because it harbors the methylerythritol phosphate pathway. To engineer C. glutamicum to produce geraniol, two different truncated geraniol synthases (GESs) were respectively expressed, and strain LX02 expressing the truncated GESs from Valeriana officinalis (tVoGES) produced 0.3 mg/L of geraniol. Then, three geranyl diphosphate synthases (GPPSs) were combinatorially co-expressed with tVoGES to improve geraniol production. The amounts of produced geraniol were all higher than that produced by strain LX02. Strain LX03 co-expressing ERG20^F96W–N127W (ERG20^WW) and tVoGES produced the highest amount, 5.4 mg/L. Subsequently, the co-overexpression of 1-deoxy-d-xylulose-5-phosphate synthase (dxs) and isopentenyl diphosphate isomerase (idi) further increased the production to 12.2 mg/L in strain LX03. Lastly, the production of geraniol was increased to 15.2 mg/L via fermentation optimization. To our knowledge, this is the first report on the engineering of C. glutamicum to produce geraniol and thus can serve as a reference for other monoterpenoid production studies.

Keywords

Corynebacterium glutamicum / Geraniol / Geraniol synthase / Overexpression / Metabolic engineering

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