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Background: 2,3-Butanediol is a chemical compound of increasing interest due to its wide applications. It can be synthesized via mixed acid fermentation of pathogenic bacteria such as Enterobacter aerogenes and Klebsiella oxytoca. The non-pathogenic Saccharomyces cerevisiae possesses three different 2,3-butanediol biosynthetic pathways, but produces minute amount of 2,3-butanediol. Hence, we attempted to engineer S. cerevisiae strain to enhance 2,3-butanediol production.

2,3-Butanediol is an important bio-based chemical product, because it can be converted into several C4 industrial chemicals. In this study, a lactate dehydrogenase-deleted mutant was constructed to improve 2,3-butanediol productivity in Enterobacter aerogenes. To delete the gene encoding lactate dehydrogenase, λ Red recombination method was successfully adapted for E. aerogenes. The resulting strain produced a very small amount of lactate and 16.7% more 2,3-butanediol than that of the wild-type strain in batch fermentation. The mutant and its parental strain were then cultured with six different carbon sources, and the mutant showed higher carbon source consumption and microbial growth rates in all media. The 2,3-butanediol titer reached 69.5 g/l in 54 h during fed-batch fermentation with the mutant,which was 27.4% higher than that with the parental strain.With further optimization of the medium and aeration conditions,118.05 g/l 2,3-butanediol was produced in 54 h during fed-batch fermentation with the mutant. This is by far the highest titer of 2,3-butanediol with E. aerogenes achieved by metabolic pathway engineering.

Butyrate pathway was constructed in recombinant Escherichia coli using the genes from Clostridium acetobutylicum and Treponema denticola. However, the pathway constructed from exogenous enzymes did not efficiently convert carbon flux to butyrate. Three steps of the productivity enhancement were attempted in this study. First, pathway engineering to delete metabolic pathways to by-products successfully improved the butyrate production. Second, synthetic scaffold protein that spatially co-localizes enzymes was introduced to improve the efficiency of the heterologous pathway enzymes, resulting in threefold improvement in butyrate production. Finally, further optimizations of inducer concentrations and pH adjustment were tried. The final titer of butyrate was 4.3 and 7.2 g/L under batch and fed-batch cultivation, respectively. This study demonstrated the importance of synthetic scaffold protein as a useful tool for optimization of heterologous butyrate pathway in E. coli.

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