Engineering methylotrophy
Turning the model bacterium E. coli into an organism that can use methanol as a carbon and energy source is challenging. In a Nature Communications paper, the Vorholt group engineered methanol-dependent E. coli strains with a functional, autocatalytic cycle and potential for future applications.
Methanol is a promising substitute for plant sugar as a raw material in biotechnology since it can be produced renewably. The introduction of methanol utilization into industrially well established bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, would therefore be of great value. This task is a challenge due to the nature of E. coli: It has evolved to degrade multi-carbon compounds with high efficiency but the assimilation of a one-carbon compound is counter-intuitive to its metabolism. Using a computational approach, Philipp Keller and coworkers at the Institute of Microbiology in collaboration with Elad Noor at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology predicted E. coli strains with a genetic background that require methanol for growth in presence of a co-substrate. Experimentally, the strains indeed showed methanol dependence and the operation of an autocatalytic cycle fueled by methanol. The strains can serve as starters for engineering efforts towards methanol to product transformation.
Link to the paper in external pageNature Communications.