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A high‐efficient strategy for combinatorial engineering paralogous gene family: A case study on histidine kinases in Clostridium
Author(s) -
Zhu Chao,
Du Guangqing,
Zhang Jie,
Xue Chuang
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
biotechnology and bioengineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 189
eISSN - 1097-0290
pISSN - 0006-3592
DOI - 10.1002/bit.27796
Subject(s) - mutant , clostridium acetobutylicum , gene , biology , function (biology) , plasmid , kinase , butanol , computational biology , metabolic engineering , genetics , biochemistry , ethanol
Microorganisms harbor bulks of functionally similar or undefined genes, which belong to paralogous gene family. There is a necessity of exploring combinatorial or interactive functions of these genes, but conventional loss‐of‐function strategy with one‐by‐one rounds suffers extremely low efficiency for generating mutant libraries with all gene permutations. Here, taking histidine kinases (HKs) in Clostridium acetobutylicum as a proof‐of‐concept, we developed a multi‐plasmid cotransformation strategy for generating all theoretical HKs combinations in one round. For five HKs with 31 theoretical combinations, the library containing 22 mutants within all the possible HKs‐inactivated combinations was constructed with 11 days compared to 242 days by conventional strategy, while the other 9 combinations cannot survive. Six mutants with the enhanced butanol production and tolerance were obtained with changes of cell development during fermentation, one of which could produce 54.2% more butanol (56.4% more solvents), while the butanol production of other mutants was unchanged or decreased. The cotransformation strategy demonstrated potentials for fast exploring pleiotropic function of paralogous family genes in cell survival, cell development, and target product metabolism.