The phenotype enhancement method identifies the Xcp outer membrane secretion machinery from Pseudomonas alcaligenes as a bottleneck for lipase production.

Pseudomonas alcaligenes M-1 has been selected from an intensive screening for micro-organisms that can naturally produce a lipase active in detergent formulations. The lipase expression has been increased to allow high level secretion from Pseudomonas alcaligenes, via the introduction of multi-copy plasmids. In order to improve the lipase yield further, the phenotype enhancement method has been developed. This idea comprises the reintroduction of a cosmid library with random chromosomal fragments in a P. alcaligenes strain with already high lipase productivity. One of the strains which showed an enhanced lipase production appeared to contain a cosmid encoding the outer membrane secretion genes. These xcp-genes are clustered in two divergently transcribed operons similar to the situation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Remarkably and dissimilar to P. aeruginosa, in between the two xcp gene clusters, two reading frames of unknown function--OrfV and OrfX--are present. For OrfX no equivalent can be found in the known protein data bases. On the other hand, OrfV shows homology to the regulatory proteins MalT and AcoK. Some evidence is provided that suggests that OrfV acts as a regulator of the xcp operons. A model is proposed for the regulation of the secretion system from P. alcaligenes.