Arabinose and xylose fermentation by recombinant Saccharomyces cerevisiae expressing a fungal pentose utilization pathway

Abstract

Background: Sustainable and economically viable manufacturing of bioethanol from lignocellulose raw material is dependent on the availability of a robust ethanol producing microorganism, able to ferment all sugars present in the feedstock, including the pentose sugars L-arabinose and D-xylose. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a robust ethanol producer, but needs to be engineered to achieve pentose sugar fermentation.

Capability of Candidas to Ferment Mixtures of Carbohydrates to Alcohol in Free Cells and Co-Culture

“…Other studies (Schimer-Michelet al [19]) reported that arabinose started to be metabolized in a later phase, when both glucose and xylose were exhausted, similar metabolic profile has been observed for other Candida sp. Bettiga et al [2] reported parallel consumption of arabinose and xylose in a mixture containing glucose; nevertheless, it was obtained with a modified S. cerevisiae strain. Alcohol production of each strain during fermentation is also shown in Fig.…”

“…Besides, a sustainable and economically viable bioalcohol process is dependent on the availability of a robust alcohol producing microorganisms, able to ferment all carbohydrates present in the feedstock including pentose carbohydrates as L-arabinose and D-xylose [2]. The microorganisms commonly used for industrial alcohol production have several advantages.…”

Beyond Genetic Engineering: Technical Capabilities in the Application Fields of Biocatalysis and Biosensors

“…Xylose fermentation can be achieved by expression of fungal xylose reductase plus xylitol dehydrogenase (Ho et al 1998) or bacterial xylose isomerase (Karhumaa et al 2007). Arabinose fermentation has proven more problematic, with cofactor imbalance generally leading to the major product being arabitol rather than ethanol (Karhumaa et al 2006), and attempts to engineer strains which could co-ferment mixtures of xylose and arabinose were still more difficult, requiring prolonged post-engineering selection (Wisselink et al 2009), though such strains have now been generated (Bettiga et al 2009;Bera et al 2010). This unexpected difficulty highlights the limitations of our ability to rationally re-engineer major metabolic pathways.…”

Microorganisms for Biorefining of Green Biomass

“…Zymomonas mobilis (Mohagheghi et al 2002;Deanda et al 1996) Fusarium oxysporum (Anasontzis et al 2011) Escherichia coli (Saha et al 2011) Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Bettiga et al 2009;Verho et al 2003;Johansson and HahnHägerdal 2002) Pichia stipitis (Xavier et al 2010) Klebsiella oxytoca (Golias et al 2002;Karimi et al 2006;Ohta et al 1991) Clostridium acetobutylicum (Li et al 2013 (Rodrussamee et al 2011;Kumar et al 2009) Caloramator boliviensis (Crespo et al 2012) Thermoanaerobacter pentosaceus (Iwasaki et al 1990) Caldicellulosiruptor saccharolyticus (Isern et al 2013) …”