Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA.
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA.
mBio. 2023 Dec 19;14(6):e0204323. doi: 10.1128/mbio.02043-23. Epub 2023 Nov 1.
A key to producing next-generation biofuels is to engineer microbes that efficiently convert non-food materials into drop-in fuels, and to engineer microbes effectively, we must understand their metabolism thoroughly. is a bacterium that is a promising candidate biofuel producer, but its metabolism remains poorly understood, especially its metabolism when exposed to oxygen. Although respires with oxygen, its aerobic growth is poor, and disruption of genes related to respiration counterintuitively improves aerobic growth. This unusual result has sparked decades of research and debate regarding the function of respiration in . Here, we used a new set of mutants to determine that respiration is essential for aerobic growth and likely protects the cells from damage caused by oxygen. We conclude that the respiratory pathway of should not be deleted from chassis strains for industrial production because this would yield a strain that is intolerant of oxygen, which is more difficult to manage in industrial settings.
生产下一代生物燃料的关键是设计能够高效地将非食用材料转化为即用燃料的微生物，而为了有效地设计微生物，我们必须彻底了解它们的新陈代谢。 是一种很有前途的生物燃料生产候选菌，但人们对其新陈代谢的了解仍很有限，特别是在有氧条件下的代谢。尽管 以氧气为呼吸基质，但它的好氧生长很差，而且与呼吸相关的基因的破坏反而会反直觉地促进好氧生长。这一不寻常的结果引发了几十年来的研究和争论，即呼吸在 中的作用。在这里，我们使用了一组新的突变体来确定呼吸对于好氧生长是必不可少的，并且可能保护细胞免受氧气造成的损伤。我们的结论是，不应该从底盘菌株中删除 的呼吸途径，因为这将产生一种对氧气不耐受的菌株，在工业环境中更难管理。
