Alexander Grünberger

The activity of bacteriophages and phage-related mobile elements is a major source for genome rearrangements and genetic instability of their bacterial hosts. The genome of the industrial amino acid producer Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032 contains three prophages (CGP1, CGP2, and CGP3) of so far unknown functionality. Several phage genes are regularly expressed, and the large prophage CGP3 (∼190 kbp) has recently been shown to be induced under certain stress conditions. Here, we present the construction of MB001, a prophage-free variant of C. glutamicum ATCC 13032 with a 6% reduced genome. This strain does not show any unfavorable properties during extensive phenotypic characterization under various standard and stress conditions. As expected, we observed improved growth and fitness of MB001 under SOS-response-inducing conditions that trigger CGP3 induction in the wild-type strain. Further studies revealed that MB001 has a significantly increased transformation efficiency and produced about 30% more of the heterologous model protein enhanced yellow fluorescent protein (eYFP), presumably as a consequence of an increased plasmid copy number. These effects were attributed to the loss of the restriction-modification system (cg1996-cg1998) located within CGP3. The deletion of the prophages without any negative effect results in a novel platform strain for metabolic engineering and represents a useful step toward the construction of a C. glutamicum chassis genome of strain ATCC 13032 for biotechnological applications and synthetic biology.

Enzymes initiating the biosynthesis of cellular building blocks are frequently inhibited by the end-product of the respective pathway. Here we present an approach to rapidly generate sets of enzymes overriding this control. It is based on the in vivo detection of the desired end-product in single cells using a genetically encoded sensor. The sensor transmits intracellular product concentrations into a graded optical output, thus enabling ultrahigh-throughput screens by FACS. We randomly mutagenized plasmid-encoded ArgB of Corynebacterium glutamicum and screened the library in a strain carrying the sensor pSenLys-Spc, which detects l-lysine, l-arginine and l-histidine. Six of the resulting N-acetyl-l-glutamate kinase proteins were further developed and characterized and found to be at least 20-fold less sensitive toward l-arginine inhibition than the wild-type enzyme. Overexpression of the mutein ArgB-K47H-V65A in C. glutamicumΔargR led to the accumulation of 34 mM l-arginine in the culture medium. We also screened mutant libraries of lysC-encoded aspartate kinase and hisG-encoded ATP phosphoribosyltransferase. We isolated 11 LysC muteins, enabling up to 45 mM l-lysine accumulation, and 13 HisG muteins, enabling up to 17 mM l-histidine accumulation. These results demonstrate that in vivo screening of enzyme libraries by using metabolite sensors is extremely well suited to identify high-performance muteins required for overproduction.