In silico-based metabolic engineering of mannheimia succiniciproducens for succinic acid production

Abstract

Importance of C4 compounds has been mentioned for a long time because of their applications and usefulness in industry. There have been a lot of efforts to substitute microbial process of producing four carbon materials for current petroleum-based process expensive and harmful to environment. We describe a method for developing the homo-production of a valuable C4 compound, succinic acid, by metabolic engineering of Mannheimia succiniciproducens MBEL55E based on its in silico experimental data. Construction of in silico metabolic network model of M. succiniciproducens with the complete genome sequence database facilitated to target the genes to be manipulated, and to develop optimal chemical defined medium. In combination with this defined medium, the targeted strain M. succiniciproducens PALK $(ldhA::Km^{r} pta-ackA::Sp^{r})$ shows homo-production of succinic acid with trivial amount of by-products through the entire fermentation. This study provides a novel method of in silico-based metabolic engineering of microorganisms to achieve homo-production of a metabolite, and pulls up the competitiveness of microbial process in industrial biotechnology.