Reconstruction of metabolic pathway for isobutanol production in Escherichia coli

Background The microbial production of useful fuels and chemicals has been widely studied. In several cases, glucose is used as the raw material, and almost all microbes adopt the Embden–Meyerhof (EM) pathway to degrade glucose into compounds of interest. Recently, the Entner–Doudoroff (ED) pathway has been gaining attention as an alternative strategy for microbial production. Results In the present study, we attempted to apply the ED pathway for isobutanol production in Escherichia coli because of the complete redox balance involved. First, we generated ED pathway-dependent isobutanol-producing E. coli . Thereafter, the inactivation of the genes concerning organic acids as the byproducts was performed to improve the carbon flux to isobutanol from glucose. Finally, the expression of the genes concerning the ED pathway was modified. Conclusions The optimized isobutanol-producing E. coli produced 15.0 g/L of isobutanol as the final titer, and the yield from glucose was 0.37 g/g (g-glucose/g-isobutanol).