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Strain improvement and metabolic flux modeling of wild-type and mutant Alcaligenes sp. NX-3 for synthesis of exopolysaccharide welan gum

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Abstract

Low-energy nitrogen ion beam implantation technique was used for the strain improvement of Alcaligenes sp. NX-3 for the production of exopolysaccharide welan gum. A high welan gum producing mutant, Alcaligenes sp. NX-3-1, was obtained through 20 keV N+ ion beam irradiation. Starting at a concentration of 50 g/L of glucose, mutant NX-3-1 produced 25.0 g/L of welan gum after 66 h of cultivation in a 7.5 L bioreactor, which was 34.4% higher than that produced by the wild-type strain. The results of metabolic flux analysis showed that the glucose-6-phosphate and acetyl coenzyme A nodes were the principle and flexible nodes, respectively. At the glucose-6-phosphate node, the fraction of carbon measured from glucose-6-phosphate to glucose-1-phosphate was enhanced after mutagenesis, which indicated that more flux was used to synthesize welan gum in the mutant. By analyzing the activities of related enzymes in the biosynthetic pathway of sugar nucleotides essential for welan gum production, we found that the specific activities of phosphoglucomutase, UDP-glucose pyrophosphorylase, UDP-glucose dehydrogenase, and dTDP-glucose pyrophosphorylase in the mutant strain were higher than those in the wild-type strain. These improvements in enzyme activities could be due to the affected of ion beam implantation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, College of Food Engineering and Light Industry, Nanjing University of Technology, Gulou, 210-009, China

    Hui Li, Hong Xu, Sha Li, Hao Xu, Chaojiang Guo & Pingkai Ouyang

  2. Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, College of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Engineering, Nanjing University of Technology; National Engineering Technique Research Center for biotechnology, Gulou, 210-009, China

    Hanjie Ying

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  1. Hui Li
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  2. Hong Xu
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  3. Sha Li
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Correspondence to Hong Xu.

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Li, H., Xu, H., Li, S. et al. Strain improvement and metabolic flux modeling of wild-type and mutant Alcaligenes sp. NX-3 for synthesis of exopolysaccharide welan gum. Biotechnol Bioproc E 15, 777–784 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12257-010-0021-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12257-010-0021-3

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