Construction of synthetic promoters for Escherichia coli and application in the biosynthesis of cis,cis-muconic acid

Abstract:

Promoter is one of important elements for gene expression and regulation. In the construction of recombinants for metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, it is necessary to have the promoters with varying strengths for fine-tuning metabolic pathway to reach the metabolic balance, decrease the accumulation of intermediate and increase the production of target metabolite. However, the natural promoters available are not completely suitable for fine-tuning metabolic pathway due to discrete strength, lack of versatility and standardization. To deal with this problem, in this study, a new 88 bp synthetic promoter, which contains the typical ?35 box, ?10 box as well as ribosome bind site, was designed. Then, the promoter library was constructed by introducing some degenerate base pairs in the sequence of 6 bp in the upstream of the initial transcription site and 14 bp in spacer region between ?35 and ?10 box. 720 promoters with varying strengths were screened out from a library of more than 5 000 clones via the expression of red fluorescent protein mCherry under the control of the synthetic promoter. The sequence analysis based on 35 promoters with varying strengths showed the promoters with varying strengths are base preference. The purine bases in ?13 site and pyrimidine bases in the transcriptional initiation sequence are of high frequency; the purine and pyrimidine bases are of the similar frequency in the spacer sequence between ?35 and ?10 box in strong promoter. In the end, five characterized promoters with varying strengths were selected to tune the synthetic pathway of cis,cis-muconic acid in Escherichia coli. The results showed that the promoters with varying strengths can regulate the production of cis, cis-muconic acid and the accumulation of the intermediate catechol.