Production of Short-Chain Fatty Acids from Long-Chain Fatty Acid in Engineered Escherichia coli

Abstract

All over the world, the efforts are under way to find the petroleum displacement resources in order to overcome fossil fuel depletion and to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. In this respect, replacing petrochemicals with renewable alternatives is one of the principal challenges of our day. Short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) can be precursors to biofuels and chain based chemicals such as adipic acid, short chain alkane and so on. Most studies about fatty acids production in E. coli have been focused on engineering its fatty acid synthesis pathway and heterologous expression of thioesterases. Because these researches based on carbohydrate feedstock. In order to apply to long chain fatty acid for feedstock, we engineered β-oxidation pathway by deleting fadE and fadR genes and expressing acyl-CoA dehydrogenases from Yarrowia lipolytica, which have substrate specificity of long chain fatty acyl-CoA. In this study, the highest yield from myristic acid feedstock to C6 and C8FA was 32.9% by the engineered strain containing Yarrowia lipolytica Aox2 during 48 hours in resting cell suspensions. Also, we found the increase in C6/C8 ratio in thioesterase overexpressing strain. Based on these results, using various oil as feedstock will be directly applied to SCFAs production.