Construction of a novel sugar alcohol-inducible expression system in Bacillus licheniformis.

Fengxu Xiao, Youran Li, Yupeng Zhang, Hanrong Wang, Liang Zhang, Zhongyang Ding, Zhenghua Gu, Sha Xu, Guiyang Shi

Applied microbiology and biotechnology 2020 Jun

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Bacillus licheniformis is an important industrial microorganism that can utilize a wide range of biomass. However, the lack of expression elements in B. licheniformis, especially regulated promoters, significantly restricts its applications. In this study, two promoters involved in the sugar alcohol uptake pathway, PmtlA and PmtlR, were characterized and developed as regulated promoters for expression. The results showed that mannitol, mannose, sorbitol, sorbose, and arabinose can act as inducers to activate expression from PmtlA at different levels. The induction by sorbitol was the strongest, and the optimal induction conditions were 15 g/L sorbitol during mid-logarithmic growth at 28 °C. In this work, the palindrome-like sequence 'TTGTCA-cacggctcc-TGCCAA' in PmtlA was identified as the binding site of the MtlR protein. This study helps to enrich the known inducible expression systems in B. licheniformis.

Citation

Fengxu Xiao, Youran Li, Yupeng Zhang, Hanrong Wang, Liang Zhang, Zhongyang Ding, Zhenghua Gu, Sha Xu, Guiyang Shi. Construction of a novel sugar alcohol-inducible expression system in Bacillus licheniformis. Applied microbiology and biotechnology. 2020 Jun;104(12):5409-5425